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LUBBOCK – Lubbock fire officials said Thursday that they are still uncertain about what caused at least one underground explosion and several fires at Texas Tech University the night before that took out power and forced an emergency shutdown of the campus.

Emergency officials said they received several calls regarding a potential gas leak just before 7 p.m. on campus. Upon arrival, firefighters found flames shooting out of manholes, a Lubbock Fire official said during a press conference Wednesday. Video from the Texas Tech campus posted by local news station KCBD shows green flames spewing from one manhole. Officials at a second press conference Thursday said the discoloration was likely caused by copper and other electronic material underground.

Texas Tech Fire Marshal Mike Kennon said teams initially responded to three different fires on campus, but later determined that there were five fires in underground vaults. Officials also said natural gas is being removed from underground, but could not confirm whether it was what caused the fires.

“Was that a result of an explosion, or electrical or a fire, or was it the other way around?” Lubbock Assistant Fire Chief Nick Wilson said. “We know it was present. We don’t necessarily know why.”

Officials on Thursday did not confirm whether there was a single explosion or several, but said on Wednesday there was at least one underground explosion inside a manhole on campus near Engineering Key, a central portion of the campus.

Evacuations began in that area shortly after firefighters arrived, and power was either automatically or intentionally shut off to avoid exacerbating the fires and prevent any further damage. No injuries have been reported.

“An event like this can obviously cascade and cause a lot worse damage than we saw,” said Matt Rose, chief public affairs officer for Lubbock Power & Light. “That being said, we’re taking this very, very seriously.”

About 40% of the campus is still without power as of Thursday afternoon, officials said, and the explosion initially caused outages across campus and at the nearby Texas Tech Health and Sciences Center. Because a bulk of the damaged systems are underground, it is unclear how long repairs may take as officials wait for portions of the tunnels to be deemed safe for repairs.

Spring break for Texas Tech students was set to start Monday, however the university announced it will be closed for the remainder of the week. For students who had chosen to remain on campus during spring break but are now without power, Texas Tech has provided housing accommodations, and food was donated by H-E-B and other groups, as well.

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

AUSTIN – Texas lawmakers are pushing more than 100 bills to clamp down on crime, threatening to overcrowd the state’s jails and prisons whose populations have continued to grow after dipping significantly during the pandemic.

Lawmakers have proposed at least 121 bills that seek to increase criminal penalties by either creating mandatory minimum sentences or by elevating punishment, according to the Texas District and County Attorneys Association. That nonprofit organization has also tracked 90 bills that would create new felonies and 96 bills that would create new misdemeanors.

Those figures only include bills filed through Monday and are expected to increase once they account for the hundreds of bills lawmakers have filed this week in advance of Friday’s bill filing deadline. Still, the estimates show the state’s growing push towards more punishment.

“Ever since 2015 there has been a pretty steady, incremental growth in the number of crimes [lawmakers] create every session,” said Shannon Edmonds, president of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association. That growth signals a “return to the law and order sentiment of previous decades,” he added.

Proposals include bills to crack down on organized retail theft, impose prison time on people who burglarize vehicles more than once and ban the possession of AI-generated child pornography.

Some proposals would provide local law enforcement officers with more tools to crack down on threats from new technology, including artificial intelligence, while other legislation would do little to deter crime and could strain the state’s already overwrought prisons and jails, experts said.

Texas’ prison population is projected to increase by about 10% over the next five years, according to the Legislative Budget Board, and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice continues to contend with a staffing shortage.

County jails’ population is also increasing. As of February, their population was about 2.5% higher than the same time last year, according to data collected by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards.

Some facilities are so short staffed that inmates are sent out of state to Mississippi and Louisiana. About 4,100 Texas jail inmates were housed outside their county of arrest, as of February, according to commission data.

“It’s important to take into account the costs these bills bear on county jails because many of them are already stretched very thin,” said Marc Levin, chief policy counsel at the nonpartisan think tank Council on Criminal Justice “If you raise things within the misdemeanor level, to a Class A misdemeanor instead of a Class B misdemeanor… you’re going to have more people sitting in county jail.”

Class A misdemeanors are punishable by up to one year in jail while Class B misdemeanors carry up to 180 days in jail. People convicted of felonies are usually held in state prisons, which currently house about 136,000 offenders.

Texas’ prison population decreased during the coronavirus pandemic to lows of about 117,000 people in January 2021. The number of people in state prisons has since grown, contributing to about 31% of the nationwide growth in the prison population over 2022 and 2023, according to a report published this week by the Prison Policy Initiative.

Session after session, Texas lawmakers introduce a slew of bills that increase criminal penalties, often in response to concerns from the public about crimes they have witnessed in their communities. It hasn’t always been that way. The late aughts saw efforts to reduce the state’s prison population by reducing sentences and diverting people away from incarceration. They fizzled around 2015, and since then, the number of new crimes that lawmakers create each session has increased, Edmonds said.In 2023, lawmakers created 58 new criminal offenses and 26 new punishments, a number higher than any of the legislative sessions over the previous 10 years, according to the prosecutors association.

This year, a handful of bills creating criminal enhancements or new crimes are in response to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s interim charges. At Patrick’s behest, the Senate Criminal Justice Committee studied the effects of organized retail crime — where a network of thieves steal large quantities of merchandise that they sell for cash, a growing concern nationally — and also identified ways to strengthen financial crime investigations.

Senate Bill 1300, filed by Sen. Pete Flores, R-Pleasanton, aims to address the $422 million in stolen goods and approximately $21 million in sales tax revenue Texas lost to organized retail crime in 2022.

The bill would increase the penalty for such crimes, based on the value of property stolen. Current law designates organized retail theft as a Class C misdemeanor — which does not allow for jail time — when the property taken is worth less than $100. The bill would increase that to a Class B misdemeanor. As the value of property stolen increases, the punishment would rise, up to a first degree felony punishable by life in prison if the total value of goods stolen exceeds $300,000.

The committee advanced the bill to the full Senate this week, even though Sen. Borris Miles, D-Houston, expressed concern that the bill would allow prosecutors to incarcerate impoverished families. A husband-wife couple in poverty could face jail time for stealing formula for their baby, even though the bill seeks to target organized retail theft rings, he asserted to lawmakers. Flores countered that prosecutors need discretion to determine whether to press charges.

Three other bills approved by the Senate Criminal Justice Committee this week target bank and credit card fraud, which bank executives said are occuring at alarming rates. And a bill by Sen. Tan Parker, R-Flower Mound, creates a specific offense for stealing mail receptacle keys or locks, with stronger penalties for those who target elderly communities.

Other bills address auto theft, an issue Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar told lawmakers has hit San Antonio particularly hard.

House Bill 727 heightens the punishment for burglarizing a vehicle when the person carrying it out has a firearm, burglarizes two or more vehicles, or uses a stolen vehicle to carry out the offense. Such crimes would be designated a state jail felony, which could lead to 180 days to two years in state jail. The bill was left pending in committee this week. Also discussed — but left pending in committee — was House Bill 548, which establishes a mandatory minimum of a year in confinement for a second auto burglary offense.

But property crimes are difficult to solve and increasing the punishment would not result in more car burglary cases getting solved, said Staley Heatly, county attorney in Wilbarger County. “It doesn’t necessarily seem like an effective tool to stop burglaries from happening,” Heatly said. “They’re difficult because people leave their cars unlocked, somebody comes by at night and rifles through the car and takes what they can. There’s going to be no witnesses, so they’re just exceedingly difficult to solve.”

Critics who spoke against the bill said burglaries are often carried out by youth who would not be deterred by an increased penalty.

Research shows that juvenile incarceration rarely produces positive results and that investing in intensive juvenile probation programs would be more successful, Levin said.

That argument was echoed during discussion of House Bill 268, which would increase the criminal penalty for making certain false reports, such as hoax calls threatening a call for mass violence against schools.

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

KARNES COUNTY – After watching news reports of seemingly random immigration raids and hearing White House officials encourage undocumented immigrants to self-deport, a Venezuelan family decided to heed the government’s advice and leave the United States for Canada a few weeks ago.

They were arrested trying to enter Canada, said their San Antonio lawyer, Laura Flores-Dixit.

Now the parents, who are in their 30s, and their two children, ages 6 and 8 — who through Flores-Dixit declined to be identified or interviewed — are among the first families to be jailed at a South Texas immigration detention facility that the Trump administration has repurposed to hold families after former President Joe Biden greatly reduced the practice.

The change at the Karnes County Detention Facility, about 50 miles southeast of San Antonio, is just one of a flurry of developments in recent weeks that’s drawing attention to privately-run immigration detention facilities that have long been criticized for poor conditions, weak standards and even weaker oversight.

When President Donald Trump vowed to deport a record number of undocumented immigrants, it was clear he would face a number of logistical challenges, starting with a limited number of federal agents to search for and arrest people — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency charged with the job, has just an estimated 6,000 officers tasked with monitoring and finding undocumented immigrants. ICE has received help from federal drug agents, Texas state troopers and other law enforcement agencies as it searches for undocumented immigrants.

The second challenge is where to hold the people they apprehend.

Texas is likely to play an outsized role in detaining immigrants because it already has 21 detention facilities that as of late February held 12,186 undocumented immigrants — reportedly the most in any state.

“Texas is the state that has had the largest number of immigrant detainees in the country for quite some time,” said Eunice Cho, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project. “Texas is really the epicenter with respect to immigration detention in the United States.”

More facilities may be opening in Texas soon. The Trump administration plans to reopen a facility in Dilley to hold families as well — which would add space for up to 2,400 people.

Public records obtained by the ACLU through a lawsuit show that ICE has been contemplating expansion of a detention facility in Laredo and considering opening another in Henderson, near the Louisiana border.

Last year, Trump’s top immigration adviser, Tom Homan, said he would accept an offer from Texas state leaders to use a 1,400-acre Starr County ranch as a staging area for mass deportations. Since then, key parties have been largely mum about plans for the property, which the Texas General Land office purchased last fall.

Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham, who made the initial offer to the Trump administration, said in a statement to the Tribune this week that Gov. Greg Abbott was leading conversations with the Trump administration about the property.

Abbott spokesperson Andrew Mahaleris told the Tribune that the governor looked forward to working with the president but did not offer additional details.

“The Governor’s Office remains in regular communication with the Trump Administration on effective strategies to secure the border,” Mahaleris said. “Under the Texas Constitution, any effort to lease or donate Texas land to the federal government must be conducted through the Governor’s Office and these conversations remain ongoing.”

Immigrants rights advocates are alarmed by the expansion of detention facilities and the resumption of detaining families. They say the private prison companies that run the facilities have an assortment of reasons to minimize costs and maximize profits — which for migrants can mean medical neglect and poor living conditions.

Employees at privately-run detention facilities have been accused of sexually assaulting migrants, violating their religious freedom and using punitive forms of incarceration like solitary confinement.

Immigration charges are civil offenses that don’t carry the same protections as those granted to people charged with a crime, said Edna Yang, the co-executive director of immigration advocacy group American Gateways.

“It’s really problematic,” Yang said. “With the jail facilities, there are several constitutional protections because you’re in a criminal process and criminal proceedings that aren’t the same in the civil context. Also a lot of the kinds of protections for individuals in criminal proceedings are enforceable whereas the civil detention standards are not enforceable — they are guidelines.”

No aspect of immigration detention draws as much condemnation as holding children.

The Trump administration resumed the practice last week when it sent 12 to 15 families to the center in Karnes, according to lawyers who began communicating with detainees this week.

The families detained at Karnes are a mix of nationalities and have been in the country for varying periods of time, said Javier Hidalgo, a lawyer with Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, known as RAICES, which is representing numerous families.

The families came from Colombia, Romania, Iran, Angola, Russia, Armenia, Turkey and Brazil, according to RAICES.

“It’s not just folks who recently arrived and are being put through expedited removal,” Hidalgo said. “It seems like the intent is more punitive, which runs exactly against the whole notion that immigration detention isn’t [the same as criminal incarceration] … Immigration detention is supposed to be civil detention — if there really is such a thing — and it can’t be punitive for deterrence.”

The Biden administration greatly reduced family detention but did not stop it entirely. Now advocates are worried the Trump administration will ramp it up to new levels, with Texas facilities becoming the hubs.

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

NOAA (AP) – More than 100 million people in the U.S. will be in the path of an intense March storm starting Friday as the sprawling multi-day system threatens fires, blizzards, tornadoes, and flooding as it tracks eastward across the Great Plains.

Scientists said the storm’s strength and potential for far-reaching impacts is notable, but its timing isn’t particularly unusual. Extreme weather can pop up in spring because storms feed on big temperature differences between the warmth that’s starting to show up and the lingering chill of winter.

“If there’s a time of the year where a storm like this can deliver these coast-to-coast impacts, we are in it,” said Benjamin Reppert, meteorologist at Penn State University.

The National Weather Service forecast strong winds stretching Friday from the Canadian border to the Rio Grande, with gusts up to 80 mph (130 kph), which creates a significant fire risk in Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Meanwhile, a winter blast was expected farther north in parts of the Rockies and Northern Plains, with possible blizzard conditions in the Dakotas and Minnesota.

The central region from the Gulf Coast to Wisconsin is at risk of severe thunderstorms that could spawn tornadoes and hail. On Saturday, severe storms are forecast to move toward Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and then into Florida. Potential flooding was a concern from the Central Gulf Coast through the upper Ohio Valley.

The turbulent weather is expected to arrive on the East Coast Sunday with strong winds and a flash flooding risk in localized areas. Heavy rain was forecast along the Interstate 95 corridor south to Jacksonville, Florida.

Reppert noted that temperatures in the upper atmosphere in much of the central and eastern U.S. are close to record levels for this time of year, while a cool air mass behind the storm in the western states is one of the coolest on record for that region and this time of year. He said that combination could be behind part of this storm’s expected strength.

Russ Schumacher, a climatologist at Colorado State University, said the storm could become a bomb cyclone Friday afternoon or evening — a designation given when a storm intensifies so rapidly that atmospheric pressure drops a certain amount in a 24-hour period. That would mean higher winds and more intense rainfall.

In addition to fuel from big temperature swings, the storm will be shaped by the jet stream. In a fairly typical position for this time of year, it’s diving south across the U.S. and will help lift air and moisture into the atmosphere to fall back as rain.

The storm also will tap into heat and moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, also referred to as the Gulf of America as declared by President Donald Trump, which is 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 to 2.2 degrees Celsius) warmer than historic averages.

“You kind of have this Goldilocks situation,” said Ryan Torn, professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences at the University at Albany, referring to the mix of ingredients in the atmosphere that will add to the storm’s strength.

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McALLEN, Texas (AP) — The Trump administration has launched a review of organizations that provide temporary housing and other aid to migrants, suggesting they may have violated a law used to prosecute smugglers.

The Department of Homeland Security has “significant concerns” that federal grants used to address a surge of migration under former President Joe Biden were used for illegal activities, wrote Cameron Hamilton, acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

His letter, dated Tuesday and obtained by The Associated Press, asks recipients of grants from FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program to provide names and contact information for migrants served and “a detailed and descriptive list of specific services provided” within 30 days. The letter says funding will be withheld during the review.

While it doesn’t explicitly threaten criminal prosecution, it raises concerns that recipients may have violated U.S. Criminal Code Section 1324, a felony offense against bringing people across the border illegally or transporting them within the United States. It also says executive officers must sign sworn statements that they have no knowledge or suspicions of anyone in their organizations violating the smuggling law.

Separately on Wednesday, federal prosecutors delivered subpoenas to shelters in New York City that have been used to house migrants, partially with funding from FEMA.

Subpoenas sent to the Roosevelt Hotel and Stewart Hotel in midtown Manhattan sought the names, birth dates and other personal information about migrants staying in the shelters, according to two people briefed on the matter who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the legal process.

A similar subpoena was delivered to a building that once housed the the Hotel Chandler, which was converted into a homeless shelter years ago but does not primarily house migrants. Local officials speculated the document may have been sent in error. The similarly named Candler building, an office tower near Times Square, currently serves as a migrant shelter.

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan and for the Justice Department in Washington declined to comment. FEMA did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Wednesday.

The demand appears to be a new salvo against organizations that provide food, housing and travel aid to people who cross the border. Migrants often arrive exhausted, low on money and unsure how to navigate on their own through bus stations and airports.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who was at odds with the Biden administration over immigration and is closely aligned with the Trump White House, took a similar tack against migrant aid groups but was blocked in court. His administration paid to bus thousands of migrants from Texas to New York City, which is required by law to provide shelter to any person who needs it.

New York City leased the empty Roosevelt Hotel, which closed after the COVID-19 pandemic, to serve as the main arrival center for newcomers. Last month, FEMA abruptly clawed back more than $80 million in grants that had been awarded to New York City during Biden’s administration after Elon Musk questioned the legality of the payments. The city has gone to court seeking the return of the money.

Mayor Eric Adams said his administration hasn’t been apprised of the investigation Thursday.

“They don’t tell us anything. We don’t have the authority to go into their reviews on immigration,” he said at an unrelated event.

But the Democrat defended migrant shelter staffers.

“The workers should never get caught up in the politics of this,” Adams said. “That is who my heart goes out to.”

Adams last month announced the shelter at the Roosevelt would cease operations by June. The city is currently housing more than 42,700 migrants in 180 sites, down from nearly 70,000 last January. Spokespersons for the Adams’ administration declined to comment on the subpoenas Thursday, citing the ongoing investigation.

FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program awarded $641 million to dozens of state and local governments and organizations across the country in the 2024 fiscal year to help them deal with large numbers of migrants who crossed the border from Mexico. They include the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Denver, as well as the United Way of Miami, the San Antonio Food Bank and several branches of Catholic Charities.

The Adams administration on Thursday confirmed it received the FEMA letter and was reviewing it.

The Trump administration has fiercely criticized states, counties and cities that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Last month, it sued Chicago over laws that it said thwarted federal law enforcement.

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Associated Press reporters Jake Offenhartz and Philip Marcelo in New York contributed to this report.