VAN ZANDT COUNTY — A 43-acre battery energy storage facility started construction in December, but soon, that work could be brought to a halt. According to our news partner KETK, the Van Zandt County Fire Marshal has issued an order to Taaleri Energia, the company behind the Amador Energy Storage project, to follow all state fire codes or face the consequences.
Shane Laneâs ranch borders the land the battery facility is being built on, and he is currently suing the Finnish-owned company over safety concerns.
âWe run a cow calf operation and they donât have any type of evacuation, they donât have any plans for anything, thereâs no safety protocol whatsoever for this facility,â Lane said.
Before construction started at the end of December, the county sent Taaleri Energia a letter requesting the documents required for the facility to be built, but they didnât receive a response until February. Read the rest of this entry »
WASHINGTON (AP) – Federal health officials said Tuesday they are pulling back $11.4 billion in COVID-19-related funds for state and local public health departments and other health organizations throughout the nation.
âThe COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,â the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement.
Officials said the money was largely used for COVID-19 testing, vaccination and global projects as well as community health workers responding to COVID and a program established in 2021 to address COVID health disparities among high-risk and underserved patients, including those in minority populations. The move was first reported by NBC News.
Lori Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County & City Health Officials, said much of the funding was set to end soon anyway. âItâs ending in the next six months,â she said. âThereâs no reason â why rescind it now? Itâs just cruel and unusual behavior.â
In a related move, more than two dozen COVID-related research grants funded by the National Institutes of Health have been canceled. Earlier this month, the Trump administration shut down ordering from covidtest.gov, the site where Americans could have COVID-19 tests delivered to their mailboxes for no charge.
Although the COVID federal public health emergency has ended, the virus is still killing Americans: 458 people per week on average have died from COVID over the past four weeks, according to CDC data.
HHS wouldn’t provide many details about how the federal government expects to recover the money from what it called âimpacted recipients.â But HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said in an email: âThe $11.4 billion is undisbursed funds remaining.â
Freeman said her understanding is that state health departments already had the COVID money.
âThe funding was authorized by Congress, was appropriated by Congress, and it was out the door, basically, into the hands of the grantees” â states, she said, which decide how to distribute it locally.
Some of the COVID money is used to address other public health issues, Freeman added. For example, wastewater surveillance that began during COVID became important for detecting other diseases, too.
âIt was being used in significant ways to track flu and patterns of new disease and emerging diseases â and even more recently with the measles outbreak,â Freeman said.
Under both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, billions of dollars was allocated for COVID response through legislation, including a COVID relief bill and the American Rescue Plan Act.
At this point, it’s unclear exactly how health departments will be affected by the pullback of funds. But some were starting to look at what it might mean for them. In Washington state, for example, health officials were notified that more than $125 million in COVID-related funding has been immediately terminated. They are âassessing the impactâ of the actions, they said.
In Los Angeles County, health officials said they could lose more than $80 million in core funding for vaccinations and other services. âMuch of this funding supports disease surveillance, public health lab services, outbreak investigations, infection control activities at healthcare facilities and data transparency,â a department official wrote in an email.
WASHINGTON (AP) â The Trump administration’s top intelligence officials stressed to Congress the threat they said was posed by international criminal gangs, drug cartels and human smuggling, testifying in a hearing Tuesday that unfolded against the backdrop of a security breach involving the mistaken leak of attack plans to a journalist.
The annual hearing on worldwide threats before the Senate Intelligence Committee offered a glimpse of the new administrationâs reorienting of priorities at a time when President Donald Trump has opened a new line of communication with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, and as his administration has focused national security attention closer to home to counter violent crime that officials link to cross-border drug trafficking.
âCriminal groups drive much of the unrest and lawlessness in the Western Hemisphere,” said Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence. Atop a long list of national security challenges, she cited the need to combat cartels that she said were âengaging in a wide array of illicit activity, from narcotics trafficking to money laundering to smuggling of illegal immigrants and human trafficking.â
Different parties prioritized different issues
The hearing occurred as officials across multiple presidential administrations have described an increasingly complicated blizzard of threats.
In the committee room, it unfolded in split-screen fashion: Republican senators hewed to the pre-scheduled topic by drilling down on China and the fentanyl scourge, while Democrat after Democrat offered sharp criticism over a security breach they called reckless and dangerous.
âIf this information had gotten out, American lives could have been lost,â Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee said of the exposed Signal messages. Added Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon: âI am of the view that there ought to be resignations.â âAn embarrassment,â said Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, who shouted down CIA Director John Ratcliffe as he demanded answers.
Gabbard and other officials did note the U.S. government’s longstanding national security concerns, including the threat she said was posed by countries including Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
China, for one, has heavily invested in stealth aircraft, hypersonic weapons and nuclear arms and is looking to outcompete the U.S. when it comes to artificial intelligence, while Russia remains a âformidable competitorâ and still maintains a large nuclear arsenal.
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed during a lengthy call with Trump to an immediate pause in strikes against energy infrastructure in what the White House described as the first step in a âmovement to peace.â
Terrorism, too, featured prominently in the hearing.
âThe direction for the FBI is to track down any individuals with any terrorist ties whatsoever, whether it be ISIS or another foreign terrorist organization,â said FBI Director Kash Patel. âAnd now to include the new designations of the cartels, down south and elsewhere.”
But the elevation of international drug trafficking as a top-tier threat was a notable turnabout in focus given that the U.S. government over the past four years has been more likely to place a premium on concerns over sophisticated Chinese espionage plots, ransomware attacks that have crippled hospitals and international and domestic terrorism plots.
The hearing unfolded in the midst of an eruption over text messaging
Tuesday’s hearing took taking place one day after news broke that several top national security officials in the Republican administration, including Ratcliffe, Gabbard and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, texted attack plans for military strikes in Yemen to a group chat in a secure messaging app that included the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic.
The text chain âcontained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Iran-backed Houthi-rebels in Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,â journalist Jeffrey Goldberg reported. The strikes began two hours after Goldberg received the details.
âHorrifiedâ by the leak of what is historically strictly guarded information, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, said he will be demanding answers in a separate hearing Wednesday with his panel.
WASHINGTON (AP) â The Supreme Court hears arguments Wednesday in a major legal fight over the $8 billion a year the federal government spends to subsidize phone and internet services in schools, libraries and rural areas, in a new test of federal regulatory power.
The justices are reviewing an appellate ruling that struck down as unconstitutional the Universal Service Fund, the tax that has been added to phone bills for nearly 30 years.
Tens of millions of Americans have benefited from the programs that receive money from the fund and eliminating it âwould cause severe disruptions,â lawyers for associations of telecommunications companies wrote.
A conservative advocacy group, Consumer Research, challenged the practice. The justices had previously denied two appeals from Consumer Research after federal appeals courts upheld the program. But the full 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, among the nationâs most conservative, ruled 9-7 that the method of funding is unconstitutional.
The 5th Circuit held that Congress has given too much authority to the FCC and the agency in turn has ceded too much power to a private entity, or administrator.
The last time the Supreme Court invoked what is known as the non-delegation doctrine to strike down a federal law was in 1935. But several conservative justices have suggested they are open to breathing new life into the legal doctrine.
The conservative-led court also has reined in federal agencies in high-profile rulings in recent years. Last year, the court reversed a 40-year-old case that had been used thousands of times to uphold federal regulations. In 2022, the court ruled Congress has to act with specificity before agencies can address âmajor questions,â in a ruling that limited the Environmental Protection Agencyâs ability to combat climate change.
The Trump administration, which has moved aggressively to curtail administrative agencies in other areas, is defending the FCC program. The appeal was initially filed by the Biden administration.
âNeither Congressâs conferral of authority on the FCC, the FCCâs reliance on advice from the administrator, nor the combination of the two violates the Constitution,â acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote in a Supreme Court brief.
Consumer Research calls the situation a ânightmare scenarioâ in which Congress has set no limits on how much the FCC can raise to fund the program. âPredictably, the USF tax rate has skyrocketed. It was under 4% in 1998 but now approaches 37%,â lawyers for the group wrote.
They said there’s an easy fix: Congress can appropriate money for the program, or at least set a maximum rate.
But last year, Congress let funding lapse for an internet subsidy program, the Affordable Connectivity Program, and the FCC moved to fill the gap by providing money from the E-rate program, one of several funded by the Universal Service Fund.
Congress created the Universal Service Fund as part of its overhaul of the telecommunications industry in 1996, aimed at promoting competition and eliminating monopolies. The subsidies for rural and low-income areas were meant to ensure that phone and internet services would remain affordable.
WEST TEXAS (AP) – The measles outbreaks in West Texas and New Mexico have surpassed a combined 370 cases, and two unvaccinated people have died from measles-related causes.
Measles is caused by a highly contagious virus that’s airborne and spreads easily when an infected person breathes, sneezes or coughs. It is preventable through vaccines, and has been considered eliminated from the U.S. since 2000.
Already, the U.S. has more measles cases this year than in all of 2024, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week. Here’s what else you need to know about measles in the U.S.
How many measles cases are there in Texas and New Mexico?
Texas state health officials said Tuesday there were 18 new cases of measles since Friday, bringing the total to 327 across 15 counties â most in West Texas. Forty people have been hospitalized since the outbreak began. Lamb County was new to the list, with one case.
New Mexico health officials announced one new case Tuesday, bringing the stateâs total to 43. Most of the cases are in Lea County, where two people have been hospitalized, and two are in in Eddy County.
Oklahoma’s state health department has nine total cases as of Tuesday, including seven confirmed cases and two probable cases. The first two probable cases were âassociatedâ with the West Texas and New Mexico outbreaks.
Measles cases also have been reported in Alaska, California, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont and Washington.
An outbreak in Kansas has grown to 10 cases across three counties â Grant, Morton and Stevens counties. A state health department spokesperson did not respond to emails about whether the outbreak is linked to the situation in Texas or New Mexico.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines an outbreak as three or more related cases. The agency counts three clusters that qualified as outbreaks in 2025 as of Tuesday.
In the U.S., cases and outbreaks are generally traced to someone who caught the disease abroad. It can then spread, especially in communities with low vaccination rates. In 2019, the U.S. saw 1,274 cases and almost lost its status of having eliminated measles.
Do you need an MMR booster?
The best way to avoid measles is to get the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. The first shot is recommended for children between 12 and 15 months old and the second between 4 and 6 years old.
People at high risk for infection who got the shots many years ago may want to consider getting a booster if they live in an area with an outbreak, said Scott Weaver with the Global Virus Network, an international coalition. Those may include family members living with someone who has measles or those especially vulnerable to respiratory diseases because of underlying medical conditions.
Adults with âpresumptive evidence of immunityâ generally donât need measles shots now, the CDC said. Criteria include written documentation of adequate vaccination earlier in life, lab confirmation of past infection or being born before 1957, when most people were likely to be infected naturally.
A doctor can order a lab test called an MMR titer to check your levels of measles antibodies, but health experts don’t always recommend this route and insurance coverage can vary.
Getting another MMR shot is harmless if there are concerns about waning immunity, the CDC says.
People who have documentation of receiving a live measles vaccine in the 1960s donât need to be revaccinated, but people who were immunized before 1968 with an ineffective measles vaccine made from âkilledâ virus should be revaccinated with at least one dose, the agency said. That also includes people who donât know which type they got.
What are the symptoms of measles?
Measles first infects the respiratory tract, then spreads throughout the body, causing a high fever, runny nose, cough, red, watery eyes and a rash.
The rash generally appears three to five days after the first symptoms, beginning as flat red spots on the face and then spreading downward to the neck, trunk, arms, legs and feet. When the rash appears, the fever may spike over 104 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the CDC.
Most kids will recover from measles, but infection can lead to dangerous complications such as pneumonia, blindness, brain swelling and death.
How can you treat measles?
Thereâs no specific treatment for measles, so doctors generally try to alleviate symptoms, prevent complications and keep patients comfortable.
Why do vaccination rates matter?
In communities with high vaccination rates â above 95% â diseases like measles have a harder time spreading through communities. This is called âherd immunity.â
But childhood vaccination rates have declined nationwide since the pandemic and more parents are claiming religious or personal conscience waivers to exempt their kids from required shots.
DALLAS (AP) – Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett mocked her stateâs governor during a weekend appearance, referring to Greg Abbott â who uses a wheelchair â as âGov. Hot Wheelsâ while speaking at a banquet in Los Angeles.
âYou all know we got Gov. Hot Wheels down there. Come on, now,â Crockett, a Dallas Democrat, said about Abbott, a Republican, while addressing the Human Rights Campaign event. âAnd the only thing hot about him is that he is a hot-ass mess, honey.â
Abbott was paralyzed in 1984 after a tree fell on him while he was running. The accident severely damaged Abbottâs spinal cord. Abbott, now 67, was elected in 2014.
Crockett, elected to the House in 2022, was roundly criticized by Republicans for the comments, an aside she made during her speech to the civil rights group event after she thanked Morgan Cox, a group board member and fellow Dallas resident, according to video of the event posted to Human Rights Campaignâs YouTube channel.
âCrockett’s comments are disgraceful,â Texas Sen. John Cornyn posted on the social media platform X. âShameful.â
Crockett suggested Tuesday that she was not referring to Abbott’s condition. Instead, she posted on X that she was referring to Abbott’s policy of sending thousands of immigrants who were in Texas illegally to cities where local policy limits cooperation with federal immigration authorities, such as New York and Philadelphia.
âI was thinking about the planes, trains, and automobiles he used to transfer migrants into communities led by Black mayors, deliberately stoking tension and fear among the most vulnerable,â the post stated.
Abbott’s office did not immediately replied to requests for comment.
Crockett has faced criticism from Republicans for suggesting last week that tech billionaire Elon Musk, heading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, âbe taken down.â
FORT WORTH (AP) – A federal judge in Texas has set a June trial date for the U.S. government’s years-old conspiracy case against Boeing for misleading regulators about the 737 Max jetliner before two of the planes crashed, killing 346 people.
U.S. District Judge Reed OâConnor did not explain in the scheduling order he issued on Tuesday why he decided to set the case for trial. Lawyers for the aerospace company and the Justice Department have spent months trying to renegotiate a July 2024 plea agreement that called for Boeing to plead guilty to a single felony charge.
The judge rejected that deal in December, saying that diversity, inclusion and equity policies the Justice Department had in place at the time might influence the selection of a monitor to oversee the companyâs compliance with the terms of its proposed sentence.
Since then, O’Connor had three times extended the deadline for the two sides to report how they planned to proceed. His most recent extension, granted earlier this month, gave them until April 11 to âconfer on a potential resolution of this case short of trial.â
The judge revoked the remaining time with his Tuesday order, which laid out a timeline for proceedings leading up to a June 23 trial in Fort Worth.
The Department of Justice declined to comment on the judge’s action. A Boeing statement shed no light on the status of the negotiations.
âAs stated in the partiesâ recent filings, Boeing and the Department of Justice continue to be engaged in good faith discussions regarding an appropriate resolution of this matter,â the company said.
The deal the judge refused to approve would have averted a criminal trial by allowing Boeing to plead guilty to conspiring to defraud Federal Aviation Administration regulators who approved minimal pilot-training requirements for the 737 Max nearly a decade ago. More intensive training in flight simulators would have increased the cost for airlines to operate the then-new plane model.
The development and certification of what has become Boeingâs bestselling airliner became an intense focus of safety investigators after two of Max planes crashed less than five months apart in 2018 and 2019. Many relatives of passengers who died off the coast of Indonesia and in Ethiopia have pushed for the prosecution of former Boeing officials, a public criminal trial and more severe financial punishment for the company.
In response to criticism of last yearâs plea deal from victimsâ families, prosecutors said they did not have evidence to argue that Boeingâs deception played a role in the crashes. Prosecutors told O’Connor the conspiracy to commit fraud charge was the toughest they could prove against Boeing.
O’Connor did not object in his December ruling against the plea agreement to the sentence Boeing would have faced: a fine of up to $487.2 million with credit given for $243.6 million in previously paid penalties; a requirement to invest $455 million in compliance and safety programs; and outside oversight during three years of probation.
Instead, the judge focused his negative assessment on the process for selecting an outsider to keep an eye on Boeingâs actions to prevent fraud. He expressed particular concern that the agreement ârequires the parties to consider race when hiring the independent monitor ⌠âin keeping with the (Justice) Departmentâs commitment to diversity and inclusion.ââ
âIn a case of this magnitude, it is in the utmost interest of justice that the public is confident this monitor selection is done based solely on competency. The partiesâ DEI efforts only serve to undermine this confidence in the government and Boeingâs ethics and anti-fraud efforts,â OâConnor wrote.
An executive order President Donald Trump signed during the first week of his second term sought to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the federal government. Trump’s move may render the judgeâs concerns moot, depending on the outcome of legal challenges to his order.
Boeing agreed to the plea deal only after the Justice Department determined last year that the company violated a 2021 agreement that had protected it against criminal prosecution on the same fraud-conspiracy charge.
Government officials started reexamining the case after a door plug panel blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 Max during flight in January 2024. That incident renewed concerns about manufacturing quality and safety at Boeing, and put the company under intense scrutiny by regulators and lawmakers.
Boeing lawyers said last year that if the plea deal were rejected, the company would challenge the Justice Department’s finding that it breached the deferred-prosecution agreement. OâConnor helped Boeingâs position by writing in his December decision that it was not clear what the company did to violate the 2021 deal.
GREGG COUNTY — The Greater Longview United Way, LANFest and CableLynx Broadband are teaming up to host the inaugural East Texas Gamer Con this Friday and Saturday, according to our news partner KETK.
âGaming has the power to bring people together, and through ETX Gamer Con, weâre channeling that connection into meaningful community support,â said Dr. Evan Dolive, the executive director of the Greater Longview United Way. âWhen you participate in this event, youâre not just playing games â youâre helping provide meals to families in need, supporting after-school programs for our youth, and ensuring our neighbors have access to vital health services.â
WASHINGTON (AP) â The United States is halfway to the next once-a-decade census, but the Supreme Court is still dealing with lawsuits that grew out of the last one.
The justices on Monday are taking up a challenge to Louisianaâs congressional map, which was drawn so that, for the first time, two of its six districts have majority Black populations that elected Black Democrats to Congress. Black Louisianans make up about one-third of the stateâs population.
Just two years ago, the court ruled 5-4 that Alabama discriminated against Black voters by adopting a congressional map with just one majority Black district, in violation of the landmark federal Voting Rights Act.
The Louisiana case features an unusual alliance of the Republican-led state government, which added a second majority Black district to essentially comply with the Alabama ruling, and civil rights groups that more often find themselves fighting the state’s redistricting plans.
A decision should come by late June.
How did we get here?
It has been a winding road. The court fight over Louisiana’s congressional districts has lasted three years. Two maps were blocked by lower courts, and the Supreme Court has intervened twice. Most recently, the court ordered the new map to be used in the 2024 election.
The stateâs Republican-dominated legislature drew a new congressional map in 2022 to account for population shifts reflected in the 2020 Census. But the changes effectively maintained the status quo of five Republican-leaning majority white districts and one Democratic-leaning majority Black district.
Civil rights advocates won a lower court ruling that the districts likely discriminated against Black voters.
The Supreme Court put the ruling on hold while it took up the Alabama case. The justices allowed both states to use congressional maps in the 2022 elections even though both had been ruled likely discriminatory by federal judges.
The high court eventually affirmed the ruling from Alabama, which led to a new map and a second district that could elect a Black lawmaker. The justices returned the Louisiana case to federal court, with the expectation that new maps would be in place for the 2024 elections.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave lawmakers in Louisiana a deadline of early 2024 to draw a new map or face the possibility of a court-imposed map.
The state complied and drew a new map.
The court must decide: politics or race?
One of the questions before the court is whether race was the predominant factor driving the new map. That’s what white Louisiana voters claimed in their separate lawsuit challenging the new districts. A three-judge court agreed.
But Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, and other state officials argue that politics, not race, helped set the boundaries. The congressional map provides politically safe districts for House Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, fellow Republicans.
The decision âreflects the imminent reality that Louisiana would be projected to lose one of five Republican congressional seatsâ when a court or the legislature adopted a second majority Black district, state Attorney General Elizabeth Murrill wrote in court papers.
Some lawmakers have also noted that the Republican lawmaker whose district was greatly altered in the new map supported a GOP opponent of Landry in the 2023 governorâs race. Former Rep. Garret Graves chose not to seek reelection under the new map.
The Supreme Court faces a lurking issue
Louisiana argues that dueling lawsuits over redistricting make it almost impossible for states to know what to do. So the state has a suggestion that, if adopted, would mark an upheaval in redistricting.
The justices could declare that racial gerrymandering cases do not belong in federal courts, Murrill wrote.
The court’s conservative majority reached that conclusion for partisan gerrymandering in 2019. Justice Clarence Thomas said the court also should no longer decide race-based redistricting cases. âDrawing political districts is a task for politicians, not federal judges,â Thomas wrote last year in an opinion no other justice joined.
But the court doesn’t have to touch that issue to resolve the Louisiana case.
A Black Democrat won the new district
The reconfigured 6th Congressional District stretches across the state, linking parts of the Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette and Baton Rouge areas. The percentage of Black voters in the district jumped from about 25% to 55%, based on data collected by the state.
The district’s voters last year elected Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat. He returned to the House of Representatives, where he had served decades earlier.
New election dates
The state also has changed the state’s election process so that the so-called jungle primary will be replaced by partisan primary elections in the spring, followed by a November showdown between the party nominees.
The change means candidates can start gathering signatures in September to get on the primary ballot for 2026.
A Supreme Court decision invalidating the congressional map would leave little time to draw a new one before then.
TYLER — The University of Oxford Somerville College Choir concert at Marvin Methodist Church in Tyler Tuesday night has been canceled. Due to the fire at Heathrow Airport last week, the group was not able to make their flight.
WASHINGTON (AP) â A federal judge blocked enforcement of President Donald Trumpâs executive order banning transgender people from military service on Tuesday, the latest in a string of legal setbacks for his sweeping agenda.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes in Washington, D.C., ruled that Trump’s order to exclude transgender troops from military service likely violates their constitutional rights. She was the second judge of the day to rule against the administration, and both rulings came within hours of an extraordinary conflict as Trump called for impeaching a third judge who temporarily blocked deportation flights, drawing a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts.
Reyes, who was nominated by President Joe Biden, delayed her order until Friday morning to give the administration time to appeal.
“The court knows that this opinion will lead to heated public debate and appeals. In a healthy democracy, both are positive outcomes,â Reyes wrote. âWe should all agree, however, that every person who has answered the call to serve deserves our gratitude and respect.â
Army Reserves 2nd Lt. Nicolas Talbott, one of 14 transgender active-duty servicemembers named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said he was holding his breath as he waited to find out if he would be separated from the military next week.
âThis is such a sigh of relief,â he said. âThis is all Iâve ever wanted to do. This is my dream job, and I finally have it. And I was so terrified that I was about to lose it.â
The White House didnât immediately respond to a message seeking comment. Trumpâs deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, posted about the ruling on social media, writing, âDistrict court judges have now decided they are in command of the Armed ForcesâŚis there no end to this madness?â
The judge issued a preliminary injunction requested by attorneys who also represent others seeking to join the military.
On Jan. 27, Trump signed an executive order that claims the sexual identity of transgender service members “conflicts with a soldierâs commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in oneâs personal lifeâ and is harmful to military readiness.
In response to the order, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a policy that presumptively disqualifies people with gender dysphoria from military service. Gender dysphoria is the distress that a person feels because their assigned gender and gender identity donât match. The medical condition has been linked to depression and suicidal thoughts.
Plaintiffsâ attorneys contend Trumpâs order violates transgender peopleâs rights to equal protection under the Fifth Amendment.
Government lawyers argue that military officials have broad discretion to decide how to assign and deploy servicemembers without judicial interference.
Reyes said she did not take lightly her decision to issue an injunction blocking Trumpâs order, noting that âJudicial overreach is no less pernicious than executive overreach.â But, she said, it was also the responsibility of each branch of government to provide checks and balances for the others, and the court âtherefore must act to uphold the equal protection rights that the military defends every day.â
Thousands of transgender people serve in the military, but they represent less than 1% of the total number of active-duty service members.
In 2016, a Defense Department policy permitted transgender people to serve openly in the military. During Trumpâs first term in the White House, the Republican issued a directive to ban transgender service members. The Supreme Court allowed the ban to take effect. President Joe Biden, a Democrat, scrapped it when he took office.
Hegsethâs Feb. 26 policy says service members or applicants for military service who have âa current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria are incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service.â
The plaintiffs who sued to block Trumpâs order include an Army Reserves platoon leader from Pennsylvania, an Army major who was awarded a Bronze Star for service in Afghanistan and a Sailor of the Year award winner serving in the Navy.
âThe cruel irony is that thousands of transgender servicemembers have sacrificedâsome risking their livesâto ensure for others the very equal protection rights the military ban seeks to deny them,” Reyes wrote.
Their attorneys, from the National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLAD Law, said transgender troops âseek nothing more than the opportunity to continue dedicating their lives to defending the Nation.â
âYet these accomplished servicemembers are now subject to an order that says they must be separated from the military based on a characteristic that has no bearing on their proven ability to do the job,â plaintiffsâ attorneys wrote. âThis is a stark and reckless reversal of policy that denigrates honorable transgender servicemembers, disrupts unit cohesion, and weakens our military.â
Government attorneys said the Defense Department has a history of disqualifying people from military service if they have physical or emotional impairments, including mental health conditions.
âIn any context other than the one at issue in this case, DoDâs professional military judgment about the risks of allowing individuals with physical or emotional impairments to serve in the military would be virtually unquestionable,â they wrote.
Plaintiffsâ attorneys say Trumpâs order fits his administrationâs pattern of discriminating against transgender people.
Federal judges in Seattle and Baltimore separately paused Trumpâs executive order halting federal support for gender-affirming care for transgender youth under 19. Last month, a judge blocked prison officials from transferring three incarcerated transgender women to menâs facilities and terminating their access to hormone therapy under another Trump order.
Trump also signed orders that set up new rules about how schools can teach about gender and that intend to ban transgender athletes from participating in girlsâ and womenâs sports.
âFrom its first days, this administration has moved to strip protections from transgender people across multiple domains â including housing, social services, schools, sports, healthcare, employment, international travel, and family life,â plaintiffsâ lawyers wrote.
Talbott, 31, of Akron, Ohio, enlisted in March 2024 as an openly trans person after fighting for roughly nine years to join the service. He said his fellow soldiers gave him some good-natured flak for being so much older than other recruits, but never treated him differently for being trans. Talbott anticipates that his colleagues will be âpretty excited that I get to stay.â
âNow I can go back to focusing on whatâs really important, which is the mission,â said Talbott, a platoon leader for a military policing unit.
EAST TEXAS — Texas Governor Greg Abbott has appointed a new 62nd Judicial District court judge who will cover cases in Delta, Franklin, Hopkins and Lamar counties. According to our news partner KETK, William âBillâ Harris of Paris is the current County Court Judge for Lamar County and Abbott has selected him to fill the 62nd Judicial District court judge seat for a term that will last till Dec. 31, 2026.
His appointment as the 62nd Judicial District court judge will have to be approved by the Texas Senate before he can fill the role. If confirmed, Harris will fill the role until a permanent replacement for former judge Will Biard is elected. Read the rest of this entry »
MIAMI (AP) â Franco Caraballo called his wife Friday night, crying and panicked. Hours earlier, the 26-year-old barber and dozens of other Venezuelan migrants at a federal detention facility in Texas were dressed in white clothes, handcuffed and taken onto a plane. He had no idea where he was going.
Twenty-four hours later, Caraballoâs name disappeared from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcementâs online detainee locator.
On Monday, his wife, Johanny SĂĄnchez, learned Caraballo was among more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants flown over the weekend to El Salvador, where they are in a maximum-security prison after being accused by the Trump administration of belonging to the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang.
SĂĄnchez insists her husband isn’t a gang member. She struggles even to find logic in the accusation.
The weekend flights
Flights by U.S. immigration authorities set off a frantic scramble among terrified families after hundreds of immigrants vanished from ICEâs online locator.
Some turned up at that massive El Salvador prison, where visitors, recreation and education are not allowed. The U.S. has paid El Salvador’s government $6 million to hold immigrants, many of them Venezuelan, whose government rarely accepts deportees from the U.S.
But many families have no idea where to find their loved ones. El Salvador has no online database to look up inmates, and families there often struggle to get information.
âI donât know anything about my son,â said Xiomara Vizcaya, a 46-year-old Venezuelan.
Ali David Navas Vizcaya had been in U.S. detention since early 2024, when he was stopped at a U.S.-Mexico border crossing where he had an appointment to talk to immigration officers. He called her late Friday and said he thought he was being deported to Venezuela or Mexico.
âHe told me, âFinally, weâre going to be together, and this nightmare is going to be over,ââ Vizcaya said in telephone interview from her home in the northern Venezuela city of Barquisimeto.
His name is no longer in ICEâs system. She said he has no criminal record and suspects he may have been mistakenly identified as a Tren de Aragua member because of several tattoos.
âHe left for the American dream, to be able to help me financially, but he never had the chance to get outâ of prison, she said.
Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have left their homeland since 2013, when its oil-dependent economy collapsed. Most initially went to other Latin American countries but more headed to the U.S. after COVID-19 restrictions lifted during the Biden administration.
An 18th century law
On Saturday, President Donald Trump announced he had invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows the U.S. to deport noncitizens without any legal recourse, including rights to appear before an immigration or federal court judge.
Many conservatives have cheered the deportations and the Trump administration for taking a hard stance on immigration.
The administration says it is using the wartime Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Tren de Aragua members, saying the gang was invading the U.S., though it has not provided any evidence to back up gang-membership claims.
U.S. officials acknowledged in a court filing Monday that many people sent to El Salvador do not have criminal records, though they insisted all are suspected gang members.
âThe lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat,â said a sworn declaration in the filing, adding that along with their suspected gang membership âthe lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose.â
ICE regional supervisor Robert Cerna said in an affidavit that agents did not rely on âtattoos aloneâ to identify potential members.
âWe followed the lawâ
On Feb. 3, Caraballo went to an ICE office in Dallas office for one of his regular mandatory check-ins with agents handling his asylum request.
He was âapprehended and releasedâ after illegally crossing the southern U.S. border in October 2023, according to Department of Homeland Security documents provided by his wife. The documents said he was a “member/active” of Tren de Aragua, but offered no evidence to support that.
What gang member, his wife asked, would walk into a federal law enforcement office during a Trump administration crackdown that has left immigrants across the country terrified?
âWe followed the law like we were told to. We never missed anyâ meetings with authorities, said SĂĄnchez, who remains in the U.S. trying to secure her husbandâs release. SĂĄnchez said her husband, whom she married in 2024 in Texas, has had no run-ins with the law in the U.S. She also showed The Associated Press a Venezuelan document showing he has a clean criminal record there.
SĂĄnchez believes he was wrongly accused of belonging to Tren de Aragua because of a clock-shaped tattoo marking his daughter’s birthday.
âHe has lots of tattoos, but thatâs not a reason to discriminate against him,â she said.
SĂĄnchez said she and her husband left Venezuela with barely $200 and spent three months sleeping in plazas, eating out of trash cans and relying on fellow migrants’ goodwill as they journeyed north.
She thought the sacrifice would be worth it. Her husband had been working as a barber since the age of 13 and was hopeful he could find a new start in the U.S., escaping poverty wages and Nicolas Maduroâs ironfisted rule in Venezuela.
Venezuela responds
The Venezuelan government has called the flights âkidnappings.â It urged its citizens living in the U.S. to return home and vowed get others back from El Salvador. But with diplomatic ties long broken between Venezuela and El Salvador, the prisoners have few advocates.
The U.S. deportations exacerbate Venezuelaâs immigration crisis by turning âmigrants into geopolitical pawns,â said Oscar Murillo, head of the Venezuelan human rights group Provea. “There is a lack of transparency on the part of the U.S. and El Salvador regarding the status of deported individuals and the crimes for which they are being prosecuted.â
SĂĄnchez is among those who believes the American dream has turned ugly. She wants to leave the U.S. once she finds her husband.
âWe fled Venezuela for a better future. We never imagined things would be worse.â
SAN ANTONIO (AP) â Two smugglers charged after 53 immigrants died in the back of a sweltering tractor-trailer with no air conditioning were found guilty Tuesday after a two-week trial. The 2022 tragedy in San Antonio was the nationâs deadliest smuggling attempt across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Jurors in federal court in San Antonio took only about an hour to convict Felipe Orduna-Torres and Armando Gonzales-Ortega, finding that they were part of a human smuggling conspiracy that resulted in death and injury. They face up to life in prison and have a June 27 sentencing date.
The immigrants had come from Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico and had paid between $12,000 and $15,000 each to be smuggled into the United States, according to an indictment in the case. They had made it as far as the Texas border city of Laredo when they were placed into a tractor-trailer with broken air conditioning for a three-hour drive to San Antonio.
As the temperature inside the trailer rose, those inside screamed and banged the walls of the trailer for help or tried to claw their way out, investigators said. Most eventually passed out. When the trailer was opened in San Antonio, 48 people were already dead. Another 16 were taken to hospitals, where five more died. The dead included six children and a pregnant woman.
âThese defendants knew the air conditioning did not work. Nevertheless they disregarded the danger,â Acting U.S. Attorney Margaret Leachman for the Western District of Texas said in a news conference after the verdict Tuesday. Orduna-Torres was the leader of the smuggling group inside the U.S., and Gonzales-Ortega was his âright-hand manâ she said.
Five men previously pleaded guilty to felony charges in the smuggling case, including the truck driver Homero Zamorano Jr., who was found hiding near the trailer in some bushes. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. Also pleading guilty are Christian Martinez, Luis Alberto Rivera-Leal, Riley Covarrubias-Ponce and Juan Francisco DâLuna Bilbao. All five will be sentenced later this year. Another person charged in the U.S. remains a fugitive, Leachman said. Several others have been charged in Mexico and Guatemala.
The incident is the deadliest among tragedies that have claimed thousands of lives in recent decades as people attempt to cross the U.S. border from Mexico. Ten immigrants died in 2017 after they were trapped inside a truck parked at a Walmart in San Antonio. In 2003, the bodies of 19 immigrants were found in a sweltering truck southeast of San Antonio.
Jose Manuel Cendan Ley, a 29-year-old medical assistant, is accused of performing an illegal abortion and practicing without a license at a clinic in connection to Maria Margarita Rojas whose arrest was announced Monday by Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Court records show Ley was arrested on March 6, released on bond a few days later, then arrested again Monday.
Rojas, 48, was also charged with providing an illegal abortion and practicing medicine without a license, which are second- and third-degree felonies. She is accused of operating three clinics northwest of Houston that performed illegal abortion procedures. Her arrest signified the first time authorities have filed criminal charges under the stateâs near-total abortion ban.
The attorney general’s office is alleging that Ley worked as a medical assistant at one of Rojasâ three clinics and performed at least one abortion illegally. In an announcement on Tuesday, the office states that Ley is a Cuban national who entered the U.S. illegally in 2022 and was later placed on parole. Rubildo Labanino Matos, 54, was also arrested in connection to the investigation for practicing medicine without a license, according to Paxton’s office.
âIndividuals killing unborn babies by performing illegal abortions in Texas will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and I will not rest until justice is served,â Paxton said in a statement. âI will continue to fight to protect life and work to ensure that anyone guilty of violating our stateâs pro-life laws is held accountable.â
Court records did not list an attorney for Ley or Rojas who could comment on their behalf.
Those convicted of performing an illegal abortion can face up to 20 years in prison, while practicing medicine without a license carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.
Texas law bans an abortion at all stages of a pregnancy and only allows exceptions when a patient has a life-threatening condition, making it one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation. Opponents of the ban say it is too vague when defining allowable medical exceptions. A state lawmaker has filed a bill that aims to clarify when medical exceptions are allowed under the law.
Earlier this year, a Louisiana grand jury indicted a New York doctor on charges that she illegally prescribed abortion pills online to a Louisiana resident. Paxton has filed a civil lawsuit against the doctor under a similar accusation.
Van Zandt County Fire Marshal orders battery facility to meet fire codes
Posted/updated on:
March 28, 2025 at
9:00 am
VAN ZANDT COUNTY — A 43-acre battery energy storage facility started construction in December, but soon, that work could be brought to a halt. According to our news partner KETK, the Van Zandt County Fire Marshal has issued an order to Taaleri Energia, the company behind the Amador Energy Storage project, to follow all state fire codes or face the consequences.
Shane Laneâs ranch borders the land the battery facility is being built on, and he is currently suing the Finnish-owned company over safety concerns.
âWe run a cow calf operation and they donât have any type of evacuation, they donât have any plans for anything, thereâs no safety protocol whatsoever for this facility,â Lane said.
Before construction started at the end of December, the county sent Taaleri Energia a letter requesting the documents required for the facility to be built, but they didnât receive a response until February. (more…)
Trump administration says it will pull back billions in COVID funding from health departments
Posted/updated on:
March 28, 2025 at
3:17 am
WASHINGTON (AP) – Federal health officials said Tuesday they are pulling back $11.4 billion in COVID-19-related funds for state and local public health departments and other health organizations throughout the nation.
âThe COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,â the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement.
Officials said the money was largely used for COVID-19 testing, vaccination and global projects as well as community health workers responding to COVID and a program established in 2021 to address COVID health disparities among high-risk and underserved patients, including those in minority populations. The move was first reported by NBC News.
Lori Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County & City Health Officials, said much of the funding was set to end soon anyway. âItâs ending in the next six months,â she said. âThereâs no reason â why rescind it now? Itâs just cruel and unusual behavior.â
In a related move, more than two dozen COVID-related research grants funded by the National Institutes of Health have been canceled. Earlier this month, the Trump administration shut down ordering from covidtest.gov, the site where Americans could have COVID-19 tests delivered to their mailboxes for no charge.
Although the COVID federal public health emergency has ended, the virus is still killing Americans: 458 people per week on average have died from COVID over the past four weeks, according to CDC data.
HHS wouldn’t provide many details about how the federal government expects to recover the money from what it called âimpacted recipients.â But HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said in an email: âThe $11.4 billion is undisbursed funds remaining.â
Freeman said her understanding is that state health departments already had the COVID money.
âThe funding was authorized by Congress, was appropriated by Congress, and it was out the door, basically, into the hands of the grantees” â states, she said, which decide how to distribute it locally.
Some of the COVID money is used to address other public health issues, Freeman added. For example, wastewater surveillance that began during COVID became important for detecting other diseases, too.
âIt was being used in significant ways to track flu and patterns of new disease and emerging diseases â and even more recently with the measles outbreak,â Freeman said.
Under both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, billions of dollars was allocated for COVID response through legislation, including a COVID relief bill and the American Rescue Plan Act.
At this point, it’s unclear exactly how health departments will be affected by the pullback of funds. But some were starting to look at what it might mean for them. In Washington state, for example, health officials were notified that more than $125 million in COVID-related funding has been immediately terminated. They are âassessing the impactâ of the actions, they said.
In Los Angeles County, health officials said they could lose more than $80 million in core funding for vaccinations and other services. âMuch of this funding supports disease surveillance, public health lab services, outbreak investigations, infection control activities at healthcare facilities and data transparency,â a department official wrote in an email.
Trump intel officials testify on threat from drug cartels
Posted/updated on:
March 28, 2025 at
3:17 am
WASHINGTON (AP) â The Trump administration’s top intelligence officials stressed to Congress the threat they said was posed by international criminal gangs, drug cartels and human smuggling, testifying in a hearing Tuesday that unfolded against the backdrop of a security breach involving the mistaken leak of attack plans to a journalist.
The annual hearing on worldwide threats before the Senate Intelligence Committee offered a glimpse of the new administrationâs reorienting of priorities at a time when President Donald Trump has opened a new line of communication with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, and as his administration has focused national security attention closer to home to counter violent crime that officials link to cross-border drug trafficking.
âCriminal groups drive much of the unrest and lawlessness in the Western Hemisphere,” said Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence. Atop a long list of national security challenges, she cited the need to combat cartels that she said were âengaging in a wide array of illicit activity, from narcotics trafficking to money laundering to smuggling of illegal immigrants and human trafficking.â
Different parties prioritized different issues
The hearing occurred as officials across multiple presidential administrations have described an increasingly complicated blizzard of threats.
In the committee room, it unfolded in split-screen fashion: Republican senators hewed to the pre-scheduled topic by drilling down on China and the fentanyl scourge, while Democrat after Democrat offered sharp criticism over a security breach they called reckless and dangerous.
âIf this information had gotten out, American lives could have been lost,â Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee said of the exposed Signal messages. Added Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon: âI am of the view that there ought to be resignations.â âAn embarrassment,â said Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, who shouted down CIA Director John Ratcliffe as he demanded answers.
Gabbard and other officials did note the U.S. government’s longstanding national security concerns, including the threat she said was posed by countries including Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
China, for one, has heavily invested in stealth aircraft, hypersonic weapons and nuclear arms and is looking to outcompete the U.S. when it comes to artificial intelligence, while Russia remains a âformidable competitorâ and still maintains a large nuclear arsenal.
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed during a lengthy call with Trump to an immediate pause in strikes against energy infrastructure in what the White House described as the first step in a âmovement to peace.â
Terrorism, too, featured prominently in the hearing.
âThe direction for the FBI is to track down any individuals with any terrorist ties whatsoever, whether it be ISIS or another foreign terrorist organization,â said FBI Director Kash Patel. âAnd now to include the new designations of the cartels, down south and elsewhere.”
But the elevation of international drug trafficking as a top-tier threat was a notable turnabout in focus given that the U.S. government over the past four years has been more likely to place a premium on concerns over sophisticated Chinese espionage plots, ransomware attacks that have crippled hospitals and international and domestic terrorism plots.
The hearing unfolded in the midst of an eruption over text messaging
Tuesday’s hearing took taking place one day after news broke that several top national security officials in the Republican administration, including Ratcliffe, Gabbard and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, texted attack plans for military strikes in Yemen to a group chat in a secure messaging app that included the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic.
The text chain âcontained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Iran-backed Houthi-rebels in Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,â journalist Jeffrey Goldberg reported. The strikes began two hours after Goldberg received the details.
âHorrifiedâ by the leak of what is historically strictly guarded information, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, said he will be demanding answers in a separate hearing Wednesday with his panel.
Supreme Court takes up $8 billion phone and internet subsidy for rural areas
Posted/updated on:
March 28, 2025 at
3:17 am
WASHINGTON (AP) â The Supreme Court hears arguments Wednesday in a major legal fight over the $8 billion a year the federal government spends to subsidize phone and internet services in schools, libraries and rural areas, in a new test of federal regulatory power.
The justices are reviewing an appellate ruling that struck down as unconstitutional the Universal Service Fund, the tax that has been added to phone bills for nearly 30 years.
Tens of millions of Americans have benefited from the programs that receive money from the fund and eliminating it âwould cause severe disruptions,â lawyers for associations of telecommunications companies wrote.
A conservative advocacy group, Consumer Research, challenged the practice. The justices had previously denied two appeals from Consumer Research after federal appeals courts upheld the program. But the full 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, among the nationâs most conservative, ruled 9-7 that the method of funding is unconstitutional.
The 5th Circuit held that Congress has given too much authority to the FCC and the agency in turn has ceded too much power to a private entity, or administrator.
The last time the Supreme Court invoked what is known as the non-delegation doctrine to strike down a federal law was in 1935. But several conservative justices have suggested they are open to breathing new life into the legal doctrine.
The conservative-led court also has reined in federal agencies in high-profile rulings in recent years. Last year, the court reversed a 40-year-old case that had been used thousands of times to uphold federal regulations. In 2022, the court ruled Congress has to act with specificity before agencies can address âmajor questions,â in a ruling that limited the Environmental Protection Agencyâs ability to combat climate change.
The Trump administration, which has moved aggressively to curtail administrative agencies in other areas, is defending the FCC program. The appeal was initially filed by the Biden administration.
âNeither Congressâs conferral of authority on the FCC, the FCCâs reliance on advice from the administrator, nor the combination of the two violates the Constitution,â acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote in a Supreme Court brief.
Consumer Research calls the situation a ânightmare scenarioâ in which Congress has set no limits on how much the FCC can raise to fund the program. âPredictably, the USF tax rate has skyrocketed. It was under 4% in 1998 but now approaches 37%,â lawyers for the group wrote.
They said there’s an easy fix: Congress can appropriate money for the program, or at least set a maximum rate.
But last year, Congress let funding lapse for an internet subsidy program, the Affordable Connectivity Program, and the FCC moved to fill the gap by providing money from the E-rate program, one of several funded by the Universal Service Fund.
Congress created the Universal Service Fund as part of its overhaul of the telecommunications industry in 1996, aimed at promoting competition and eliminating monopolies. The subsidies for rural and low-income areas were meant to ensure that phone and internet services would remain affordable.
A decision is expected by late June.
Measles cases hit 370 total in Texas and New Mexico
Posted/updated on:
March 28, 2025 at
3:17 am
WEST TEXAS (AP) – The measles outbreaks in West Texas and New Mexico have surpassed a combined 370 cases, and two unvaccinated people have died from measles-related causes.
Measles is caused by a highly contagious virus that’s airborne and spreads easily when an infected person breathes, sneezes or coughs. It is preventable through vaccines, and has been considered eliminated from the U.S. since 2000.
Already, the U.S. has more measles cases this year than in all of 2024, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week. Here’s what else you need to know about measles in the U.S.
How many measles cases are there in Texas and New Mexico?
Texas state health officials said Tuesday there were 18 new cases of measles since Friday, bringing the total to 327 across 15 counties â most in West Texas. Forty people have been hospitalized since the outbreak began. Lamb County was new to the list, with one case.
New Mexico health officials announced one new case Tuesday, bringing the stateâs total to 43. Most of the cases are in Lea County, where two people have been hospitalized, and two are in in Eddy County.
Oklahoma’s state health department has nine total cases as of Tuesday, including seven confirmed cases and two probable cases. The first two probable cases were âassociatedâ with the West Texas and New Mexico outbreaks.
Measles cases also have been reported in Alaska, California, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont and Washington.
An outbreak in Kansas has grown to 10 cases across three counties â Grant, Morton and Stevens counties. A state health department spokesperson did not respond to emails about whether the outbreak is linked to the situation in Texas or New Mexico.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines an outbreak as three or more related cases. The agency counts three clusters that qualified as outbreaks in 2025 as of Tuesday.
In the U.S., cases and outbreaks are generally traced to someone who caught the disease abroad. It can then spread, especially in communities with low vaccination rates. In 2019, the U.S. saw 1,274 cases and almost lost its status of having eliminated measles.
Do you need an MMR booster?
The best way to avoid measles is to get the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. The first shot is recommended for children between 12 and 15 months old and the second between 4 and 6 years old.
People at high risk for infection who got the shots many years ago may want to consider getting a booster if they live in an area with an outbreak, said Scott Weaver with the Global Virus Network, an international coalition. Those may include family members living with someone who has measles or those especially vulnerable to respiratory diseases because of underlying medical conditions.
Adults with âpresumptive evidence of immunityâ generally donât need measles shots now, the CDC said. Criteria include written documentation of adequate vaccination earlier in life, lab confirmation of past infection or being born before 1957, when most people were likely to be infected naturally.
A doctor can order a lab test called an MMR titer to check your levels of measles antibodies, but health experts don’t always recommend this route and insurance coverage can vary.
Getting another MMR shot is harmless if there are concerns about waning immunity, the CDC says.
People who have documentation of receiving a live measles vaccine in the 1960s donât need to be revaccinated, but people who were immunized before 1968 with an ineffective measles vaccine made from âkilledâ virus should be revaccinated with at least one dose, the agency said. That also includes people who donât know which type they got.
What are the symptoms of measles?
Measles first infects the respiratory tract, then spreads throughout the body, causing a high fever, runny nose, cough, red, watery eyes and a rash.
The rash generally appears three to five days after the first symptoms, beginning as flat red spots on the face and then spreading downward to the neck, trunk, arms, legs and feet. When the rash appears, the fever may spike over 104 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the CDC.
Most kids will recover from measles, but infection can lead to dangerous complications such as pneumonia, blindness, brain swelling and death.
How can you treat measles?
Thereâs no specific treatment for measles, so doctors generally try to alleviate symptoms, prevent complications and keep patients comfortable.
Why do vaccination rates matter?
In communities with high vaccination rates â above 95% â diseases like measles have a harder time spreading through communities. This is called âherd immunity.â
But childhood vaccination rates have declined nationwide since the pandemic and more parents are claiming religious or personal conscience waivers to exempt their kids from required shots.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett mocks Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, as ‘Gov. Hot Wheels’
Posted/updated on:
March 27, 2025 at
3:37 am
DALLAS (AP) – Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett mocked her stateâs governor during a weekend appearance, referring to Greg Abbott â who uses a wheelchair â as âGov. Hot Wheelsâ while speaking at a banquet in Los Angeles.
âYou all know we got Gov. Hot Wheels down there. Come on, now,â Crockett, a Dallas Democrat, said about Abbott, a Republican, while addressing the Human Rights Campaign event. âAnd the only thing hot about him is that he is a hot-ass mess, honey.â
Abbott was paralyzed in 1984 after a tree fell on him while he was running. The accident severely damaged Abbottâs spinal cord. Abbott, now 67, was elected in 2014.
Crockett, elected to the House in 2022, was roundly criticized by Republicans for the comments, an aside she made during her speech to the civil rights group event after she thanked Morgan Cox, a group board member and fellow Dallas resident, according to video of the event posted to Human Rights Campaignâs YouTube channel.
âCrockett’s comments are disgraceful,â Texas Sen. John Cornyn posted on the social media platform X. âShameful.â
Crockett suggested Tuesday that she was not referring to Abbott’s condition. Instead, she posted on X that she was referring to Abbott’s policy of sending thousands of immigrants who were in Texas illegally to cities where local policy limits cooperation with federal immigration authorities, such as New York and Philadelphia.
âI was thinking about the planes, trains, and automobiles he used to transfer migrants into communities led by Black mayors, deliberately stoking tension and fear among the most vulnerable,â the post stated.
Abbott’s office did not immediately replied to requests for comment.
Crockett has faced criticism from Republicans for suggesting last week that tech billionaire Elon Musk, heading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, âbe taken down.â
Judge orders a June trial for US government’s felony case against Boeing
Posted/updated on:
March 27, 2025 at
3:37 am
FORT WORTH (AP) – A federal judge in Texas has set a June trial date for the U.S. government’s years-old conspiracy case against Boeing for misleading regulators about the 737 Max jetliner before two of the planes crashed, killing 346 people.
U.S. District Judge Reed OâConnor did not explain in the scheduling order he issued on Tuesday why he decided to set the case for trial. Lawyers for the aerospace company and the Justice Department have spent months trying to renegotiate a July 2024 plea agreement that called for Boeing to plead guilty to a single felony charge.
The judge rejected that deal in December, saying that diversity, inclusion and equity policies the Justice Department had in place at the time might influence the selection of a monitor to oversee the companyâs compliance with the terms of its proposed sentence.
Since then, O’Connor had three times extended the deadline for the two sides to report how they planned to proceed. His most recent extension, granted earlier this month, gave them until April 11 to âconfer on a potential resolution of this case short of trial.â
The judge revoked the remaining time with his Tuesday order, which laid out a timeline for proceedings leading up to a June 23 trial in Fort Worth.
The Department of Justice declined to comment on the judge’s action. A Boeing statement shed no light on the status of the negotiations.
âAs stated in the partiesâ recent filings, Boeing and the Department of Justice continue to be engaged in good faith discussions regarding an appropriate resolution of this matter,â the company said.
The deal the judge refused to approve would have averted a criminal trial by allowing Boeing to plead guilty to conspiring to defraud Federal Aviation Administration regulators who approved minimal pilot-training requirements for the 737 Max nearly a decade ago. More intensive training in flight simulators would have increased the cost for airlines to operate the then-new plane model.
The development and certification of what has become Boeingâs bestselling airliner became an intense focus of safety investigators after two of Max planes crashed less than five months apart in 2018 and 2019. Many relatives of passengers who died off the coast of Indonesia and in Ethiopia have pushed for the prosecution of former Boeing officials, a public criminal trial and more severe financial punishment for the company.
In response to criticism of last yearâs plea deal from victimsâ families, prosecutors said they did not have evidence to argue that Boeingâs deception played a role in the crashes. Prosecutors told O’Connor the conspiracy to commit fraud charge was the toughest they could prove against Boeing.
O’Connor did not object in his December ruling against the plea agreement to the sentence Boeing would have faced: a fine of up to $487.2 million with credit given for $243.6 million in previously paid penalties; a requirement to invest $455 million in compliance and safety programs; and outside oversight during three years of probation.
Instead, the judge focused his negative assessment on the process for selecting an outsider to keep an eye on Boeingâs actions to prevent fraud. He expressed particular concern that the agreement ârequires the parties to consider race when hiring the independent monitor ⌠âin keeping with the (Justice) Departmentâs commitment to diversity and inclusion.ââ
âIn a case of this magnitude, it is in the utmost interest of justice that the public is confident this monitor selection is done based solely on competency. The partiesâ DEI efforts only serve to undermine this confidence in the government and Boeingâs ethics and anti-fraud efforts,â OâConnor wrote.
An executive order President Donald Trump signed during the first week of his second term sought to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the federal government. Trump’s move may render the judgeâs concerns moot, depending on the outcome of legal challenges to his order.
Boeing agreed to the plea deal only after the Justice Department determined last year that the company violated a 2021 agreement that had protected it against criminal prosecution on the same fraud-conspiracy charge.
Government officials started reexamining the case after a door plug panel blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 Max during flight in January 2024. That incident renewed concerns about manufacturing quality and safety at Boeing, and put the company under intense scrutiny by regulators and lawmakers.
Boeing lawyers said last year that if the plea deal were rejected, the company would challenge the Justice Department’s finding that it breached the deferred-prosecution agreement. OâConnor helped Boeingâs position by writing in his December decision that it was not clear what the company did to violate the 2021 deal.
First ever East Texas Gamer Con coming to Longview
Posted/updated on:
March 27, 2025 at
3:25 am
GREGG COUNTY — The Greater Longview United Way, LANFest and CableLynx Broadband are teaming up to host the inaugural East Texas Gamer Con this Friday and Saturday, according to our news partner KETK.
âGaming has the power to bring people together, and through ETX Gamer Con, weâre channeling that connection into meaningful community support,â said Dr. Evan Dolive, the executive director of the Greater Longview United Way. âWhen you participate in this event, youâre not just playing games â youâre helping provide meals to families in need, supporting after-school programs for our youth, and ensuring our neighbors have access to vital health services.â
The conventionâs lineup consists of the following exciting activities: (more…)
Halfway to the 2030 census, the Supreme Court is still dealing with lawsuits over the last one
Posted/updated on:
March 25, 2025 at
7:13 am
WASHINGTON (AP) â The United States is halfway to the next once-a-decade census, but the Supreme Court is still dealing with lawsuits that grew out of the last one.
The justices on Monday are taking up a challenge to Louisianaâs congressional map, which was drawn so that, for the first time, two of its six districts have majority Black populations that elected Black Democrats to Congress. Black Louisianans make up about one-third of the stateâs population.
Just two years ago, the court ruled 5-4 that Alabama discriminated against Black voters by adopting a congressional map with just one majority Black district, in violation of the landmark federal Voting Rights Act.
The Louisiana case features an unusual alliance of the Republican-led state government, which added a second majority Black district to essentially comply with the Alabama ruling, and civil rights groups that more often find themselves fighting the state’s redistricting plans.
A decision should come by late June.
How did we get here?
It has been a winding road. The court fight over Louisiana’s congressional districts has lasted three years. Two maps were blocked by lower courts, and the Supreme Court has intervened twice. Most recently, the court ordered the new map to be used in the 2024 election.
The stateâs Republican-dominated legislature drew a new congressional map in 2022 to account for population shifts reflected in the 2020 Census. But the changes effectively maintained the status quo of five Republican-leaning majority white districts and one Democratic-leaning majority Black district.
Civil rights advocates won a lower court ruling that the districts likely discriminated against Black voters.
The Supreme Court put the ruling on hold while it took up the Alabama case. The justices allowed both states to use congressional maps in the 2022 elections even though both had been ruled likely discriminatory by federal judges.
The high court eventually affirmed the ruling from Alabama, which led to a new map and a second district that could elect a Black lawmaker. The justices returned the Louisiana case to federal court, with the expectation that new maps would be in place for the 2024 elections.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave lawmakers in Louisiana a deadline of early 2024 to draw a new map or face the possibility of a court-imposed map.
The state complied and drew a new map.
The court must decide: politics or race?
One of the questions before the court is whether race was the predominant factor driving the new map. That’s what white Louisiana voters claimed in their separate lawsuit challenging the new districts. A three-judge court agreed.
But Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, and other state officials argue that politics, not race, helped set the boundaries. The congressional map provides politically safe districts for House Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, fellow Republicans.
The decision âreflects the imminent reality that Louisiana would be projected to lose one of five Republican congressional seatsâ when a court or the legislature adopted a second majority Black district, state Attorney General Elizabeth Murrill wrote in court papers.
Some lawmakers have also noted that the Republican lawmaker whose district was greatly altered in the new map supported a GOP opponent of Landry in the 2023 governorâs race. Former Rep. Garret Graves chose not to seek reelection under the new map.
The Supreme Court faces a lurking issue
Louisiana argues that dueling lawsuits over redistricting make it almost impossible for states to know what to do. So the state has a suggestion that, if adopted, would mark an upheaval in redistricting.
The justices could declare that racial gerrymandering cases do not belong in federal courts, Murrill wrote.
The court’s conservative majority reached that conclusion for partisan gerrymandering in 2019. Justice Clarence Thomas said the court also should no longer decide race-based redistricting cases. âDrawing political districts is a task for politicians, not federal judges,â Thomas wrote last year in an opinion no other justice joined.
But the court doesn’t have to touch that issue to resolve the Louisiana case.
A Black Democrat won the new district
The reconfigured 6th Congressional District stretches across the state, linking parts of the Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette and Baton Rouge areas. The percentage of Black voters in the district jumped from about 25% to 55%, based on data collected by the state.
The district’s voters last year elected Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat. He returned to the House of Representatives, where he had served decades earlier.
New election dates
The state also has changed the state’s election process so that the so-called jungle primary will be replaced by partisan primary elections in the spring, followed by a November showdown between the party nominees.
The change means candidates can start gathering signatures in September to get on the primary ballot for 2026.
A Supreme Court decision invalidating the congressional map would leave little time to draw a new one before then.
University of Oxford Somerville College Choir concert canceled
Posted/updated on:
March 25, 2025 at
3:16 pm
TYLER — The University of Oxford Somerville College Choir concert at Marvin Methodist Church in Tyler Tuesday night has been canceled. Due to the fire at Heathrow Airport last week, the group was not able to make their flight.
Federal judge blocks Trump administration’s transgender military service ban
Posted/updated on:
March 21, 2025 at
3:15 am
WASHINGTON (AP) â A federal judge blocked enforcement of President Donald Trumpâs executive order banning transgender people from military service on Tuesday, the latest in a string of legal setbacks for his sweeping agenda.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes in Washington, D.C., ruled that Trump’s order to exclude transgender troops from military service likely violates their constitutional rights. She was the second judge of the day to rule against the administration, and both rulings came within hours of an extraordinary conflict as Trump called for impeaching a third judge who temporarily blocked deportation flights, drawing a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts.
Reyes, who was nominated by President Joe Biden, delayed her order until Friday morning to give the administration time to appeal.
“The court knows that this opinion will lead to heated public debate and appeals. In a healthy democracy, both are positive outcomes,â Reyes wrote. âWe should all agree, however, that every person who has answered the call to serve deserves our gratitude and respect.â
Army Reserves 2nd Lt. Nicolas Talbott, one of 14 transgender active-duty servicemembers named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said he was holding his breath as he waited to find out if he would be separated from the military next week.
âThis is such a sigh of relief,â he said. âThis is all Iâve ever wanted to do. This is my dream job, and I finally have it. And I was so terrified that I was about to lose it.â
The White House didnât immediately respond to a message seeking comment. Trumpâs deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, posted about the ruling on social media, writing, âDistrict court judges have now decided they are in command of the Armed ForcesâŚis there no end to this madness?â
The judge issued a preliminary injunction requested by attorneys who also represent others seeking to join the military.
On Jan. 27, Trump signed an executive order that claims the sexual identity of transgender service members “conflicts with a soldierâs commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in oneâs personal lifeâ and is harmful to military readiness.
In response to the order, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a policy that presumptively disqualifies people with gender dysphoria from military service. Gender dysphoria is the distress that a person feels because their assigned gender and gender identity donât match. The medical condition has been linked to depression and suicidal thoughts.
Plaintiffsâ attorneys contend Trumpâs order violates transgender peopleâs rights to equal protection under the Fifth Amendment.
Government lawyers argue that military officials have broad discretion to decide how to assign and deploy servicemembers without judicial interference.
Reyes said she did not take lightly her decision to issue an injunction blocking Trumpâs order, noting that âJudicial overreach is no less pernicious than executive overreach.â But, she said, it was also the responsibility of each branch of government to provide checks and balances for the others, and the court âtherefore must act to uphold the equal protection rights that the military defends every day.â
Thousands of transgender people serve in the military, but they represent less than 1% of the total number of active-duty service members.
In 2016, a Defense Department policy permitted transgender people to serve openly in the military. During Trumpâs first term in the White House, the Republican issued a directive to ban transgender service members. The Supreme Court allowed the ban to take effect. President Joe Biden, a Democrat, scrapped it when he took office.
Hegsethâs Feb. 26 policy says service members or applicants for military service who have âa current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria are incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service.â
The plaintiffs who sued to block Trumpâs order include an Army Reserves platoon leader from Pennsylvania, an Army major who was awarded a Bronze Star for service in Afghanistan and a Sailor of the Year award winner serving in the Navy.
âThe cruel irony is that thousands of transgender servicemembers have sacrificedâsome risking their livesâto ensure for others the very equal protection rights the military ban seeks to deny them,” Reyes wrote.
Their attorneys, from the National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLAD Law, said transgender troops âseek nothing more than the opportunity to continue dedicating their lives to defending the Nation.â
âYet these accomplished servicemembers are now subject to an order that says they must be separated from the military based on a characteristic that has no bearing on their proven ability to do the job,â plaintiffsâ attorneys wrote. âThis is a stark and reckless reversal of policy that denigrates honorable transgender servicemembers, disrupts unit cohesion, and weakens our military.â
Government attorneys said the Defense Department has a history of disqualifying people from military service if they have physical or emotional impairments, including mental health conditions.
âIn any context other than the one at issue in this case, DoDâs professional military judgment about the risks of allowing individuals with physical or emotional impairments to serve in the military would be virtually unquestionable,â they wrote.
Plaintiffsâ attorneys say Trumpâs order fits his administrationâs pattern of discriminating against transgender people.
Federal judges in Seattle and Baltimore separately paused Trumpâs executive order halting federal support for gender-affirming care for transgender youth under 19. Last month, a judge blocked prison officials from transferring three incarcerated transgender women to menâs facilities and terminating their access to hormone therapy under another Trump order.
Trump also signed orders that set up new rules about how schools can teach about gender and that intend to ban transgender athletes from participating in girlsâ and womenâs sports.
âFrom its first days, this administration has moved to strip protections from transgender people across multiple domains â including housing, social services, schools, sports, healthcare, employment, international travel, and family life,â plaintiffsâ lawyers wrote.
Talbott, 31, of Akron, Ohio, enlisted in March 2024 as an openly trans person after fighting for roughly nine years to join the service. He said his fellow soldiers gave him some good-natured flak for being so much older than other recruits, but never treated him differently for being trans. Talbott anticipates that his colleagues will be âpretty excited that I get to stay.â
âNow I can go back to focusing on whatâs really important, which is the mission,â said Talbott, a platoon leader for a military policing unit.
Governor Abbott appoints 62nd Judicial District court judge
Posted/updated on:
March 22, 2025 at
5:55 am
EAST TEXAS — Texas Governor Greg Abbott has appointed a new 62nd Judicial District court judge who will cover cases in Delta, Franklin, Hopkins and Lamar counties. According to our news partner KETK, William âBillâ Harris of Paris is the current County Court Judge for Lamar County and Abbott has selected him to fill the 62nd Judicial District court judge seat for a term that will last till Dec. 31, 2026.
His appointment as the 62nd Judicial District court judge will have to be approved by the Texas Senate before he can fill the role. If confirmed, Harris will fill the role until a permanent replacement for former judge Will Biard is elected. (more…)
Immigrants disappear from US detainee tracking system after deportation flights
Posted/updated on:
March 21, 2025 at
3:15 am
MIAMI (AP) â Franco Caraballo called his wife Friday night, crying and panicked. Hours earlier, the 26-year-old barber and dozens of other Venezuelan migrants at a federal detention facility in Texas were dressed in white clothes, handcuffed and taken onto a plane. He had no idea where he was going.
Twenty-four hours later, Caraballoâs name disappeared from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcementâs online detainee locator.
On Monday, his wife, Johanny SĂĄnchez, learned Caraballo was among more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants flown over the weekend to El Salvador, where they are in a maximum-security prison after being accused by the Trump administration of belonging to the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang.
SĂĄnchez insists her husband isn’t a gang member. She struggles even to find logic in the accusation.
The weekend flights
Flights by U.S. immigration authorities set off a frantic scramble among terrified families after hundreds of immigrants vanished from ICEâs online locator.
Some turned up at that massive El Salvador prison, where visitors, recreation and education are not allowed. The U.S. has paid El Salvador’s government $6 million to hold immigrants, many of them Venezuelan, whose government rarely accepts deportees from the U.S.
But many families have no idea where to find their loved ones. El Salvador has no online database to look up inmates, and families there often struggle to get information.
âI donât know anything about my son,â said Xiomara Vizcaya, a 46-year-old Venezuelan.
Ali David Navas Vizcaya had been in U.S. detention since early 2024, when he was stopped at a U.S.-Mexico border crossing where he had an appointment to talk to immigration officers. He called her late Friday and said he thought he was being deported to Venezuela or Mexico.
âHe told me, âFinally, weâre going to be together, and this nightmare is going to be over,ââ Vizcaya said in telephone interview from her home in the northern Venezuela city of Barquisimeto.
His name is no longer in ICEâs system. She said he has no criminal record and suspects he may have been mistakenly identified as a Tren de Aragua member because of several tattoos.
âHe left for the American dream, to be able to help me financially, but he never had the chance to get outâ of prison, she said.
Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have left their homeland since 2013, when its oil-dependent economy collapsed. Most initially went to other Latin American countries but more headed to the U.S. after COVID-19 restrictions lifted during the Biden administration.
An 18th century law
On Saturday, President Donald Trump announced he had invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows the U.S. to deport noncitizens without any legal recourse, including rights to appear before an immigration or federal court judge.
Many conservatives have cheered the deportations and the Trump administration for taking a hard stance on immigration.
The administration says it is using the wartime Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Tren de Aragua members, saying the gang was invading the U.S., though it has not provided any evidence to back up gang-membership claims.
U.S. officials acknowledged in a court filing Monday that many people sent to El Salvador do not have criminal records, though they insisted all are suspected gang members.
âThe lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat,â said a sworn declaration in the filing, adding that along with their suspected gang membership âthe lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose.â
ICE regional supervisor Robert Cerna said in an affidavit that agents did not rely on âtattoos aloneâ to identify potential members.
âWe followed the lawâ
On Feb. 3, Caraballo went to an ICE office in Dallas office for one of his regular mandatory check-ins with agents handling his asylum request.
He was âapprehended and releasedâ after illegally crossing the southern U.S. border in October 2023, according to Department of Homeland Security documents provided by his wife. The documents said he was a “member/active” of Tren de Aragua, but offered no evidence to support that.
What gang member, his wife asked, would walk into a federal law enforcement office during a Trump administration crackdown that has left immigrants across the country terrified?
âWe followed the law like we were told to. We never missed anyâ meetings with authorities, said SĂĄnchez, who remains in the U.S. trying to secure her husbandâs release. SĂĄnchez said her husband, whom she married in 2024 in Texas, has had no run-ins with the law in the U.S. She also showed The Associated Press a Venezuelan document showing he has a clean criminal record there.
SĂĄnchez believes he was wrongly accused of belonging to Tren de Aragua because of a clock-shaped tattoo marking his daughter’s birthday.
âHe has lots of tattoos, but thatâs not a reason to discriminate against him,â she said.
SĂĄnchez said she and her husband left Venezuela with barely $200 and spent three months sleeping in plazas, eating out of trash cans and relying on fellow migrants’ goodwill as they journeyed north.
She thought the sacrifice would be worth it. Her husband had been working as a barber since the age of 13 and was hopeful he could find a new start in the U.S., escaping poverty wages and Nicolas Maduroâs ironfisted rule in Venezuela.
Venezuela responds
The Venezuelan government has called the flights âkidnappings.â It urged its citizens living in the U.S. to return home and vowed get others back from El Salvador. But with diplomatic ties long broken between Venezuela and El Salvador, the prisoners have few advocates.
The U.S. deportations exacerbate Venezuelaâs immigration crisis by turning âmigrants into geopolitical pawns,â said Oscar Murillo, head of the Venezuelan human rights group Provea. “There is a lack of transparency on the part of the U.S. and El Salvador regarding the status of deported individuals and the crimes for which they are being prosecuted.â
SĂĄnchez is among those who believes the American dream has turned ugly. She wants to leave the U.S. once she finds her husband.
âWe fled Venezuela for a better future. We never imagined things would be worse.â
Two men found guilty in smuggling conspiracy where 53 immigrants died
Posted/updated on:
March 21, 2025 at
3:15 am
SAN ANTONIO (AP) â Two smugglers charged after 53 immigrants died in the back of a sweltering tractor-trailer with no air conditioning were found guilty Tuesday after a two-week trial. The 2022 tragedy in San Antonio was the nationâs deadliest smuggling attempt across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Jurors in federal court in San Antonio took only about an hour to convict Felipe Orduna-Torres and Armando Gonzales-Ortega, finding that they were part of a human smuggling conspiracy that resulted in death and injury. They face up to life in prison and have a June 27 sentencing date.
The immigrants had come from Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico and had paid between $12,000 and $15,000 each to be smuggled into the United States, according to an indictment in the case. They had made it as far as the Texas border city of Laredo when they were placed into a tractor-trailer with broken air conditioning for a three-hour drive to San Antonio.
As the temperature inside the trailer rose, those inside screamed and banged the walls of the trailer for help or tried to claw their way out, investigators said. Most eventually passed out. When the trailer was opened in San Antonio, 48 people were already dead. Another 16 were taken to hospitals, where five more died. The dead included six children and a pregnant woman.
âThese defendants knew the air conditioning did not work. Nevertheless they disregarded the danger,â Acting U.S. Attorney Margaret Leachman for the Western District of Texas said in a news conference after the verdict Tuesday. Orduna-Torres was the leader of the smuggling group inside the U.S., and Gonzales-Ortega was his âright-hand manâ she said.
Five men previously pleaded guilty to felony charges in the smuggling case, including the truck driver Homero Zamorano Jr., who was found hiding near the trailer in some bushes. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. Also pleading guilty are Christian Martinez, Luis Alberto Rivera-Leal, Riley Covarrubias-Ponce and Juan Francisco DâLuna Bilbao. All five will be sentenced later this year. Another person charged in the U.S. remains a fugitive, Leachman said. Several others have been charged in Mexico and Guatemala.
The incident is the deadliest among tragedies that have claimed thousands of lives in recent decades as people attempt to cross the U.S. border from Mexico. Ten immigrants died in 2017 after they were trapped inside a truck parked at a Walmart in San Antonio. In 2003, the bodies of 19 immigrants were found in a sweltering truck southeast of San Antonio.
Medical assistant arrested in connection to clinics accused of providing illegal abortions
Jose Manuel Cendan Ley, a 29-year-old medical assistant, is accused of performing an illegal abortion and practicing without a license at a clinic in connection to Maria Margarita Rojas whose arrest was announced Monday by Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Court records show Ley was arrested on March 6, released on bond a few days later, then arrested again Monday.
Rojas, 48, was also charged with providing an illegal abortion and practicing medicine without a license, which are second- and third-degree felonies. She is accused of operating three clinics northwest of Houston that performed illegal abortion procedures. Her arrest signified the first time authorities have filed criminal charges under the stateâs near-total abortion ban.
The attorney general’s office is alleging that Ley worked as a medical assistant at one of Rojasâ three clinics and performed at least one abortion illegally. In an announcement on Tuesday, the office states that Ley is a Cuban national who entered the U.S. illegally in 2022 and was later placed on parole. Rubildo Labanino Matos, 54, was also arrested in connection to the investigation for practicing medicine without a license, according to Paxton’s office.
âIndividuals killing unborn babies by performing illegal abortions in Texas will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and I will not rest until justice is served,â Paxton said in a statement. âI will continue to fight to protect life and work to ensure that anyone guilty of violating our stateâs pro-life laws is held accountable.â
Court records did not list an attorney for Ley or Rojas who could comment on their behalf.
Those convicted of performing an illegal abortion can face up to 20 years in prison, while practicing medicine without a license carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.
Texas law bans an abortion at all stages of a pregnancy and only allows exceptions when a patient has a life-threatening condition, making it one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation. Opponents of the ban say it is too vague when defining allowable medical exceptions. A state lawmaker has filed a bill that aims to clarify when medical exceptions are allowed under the law.
Earlier this year, a Louisiana grand jury indicted a New York doctor on charges that she illegally prescribed abortion pills online to a Louisiana resident. Paxton has filed a civil lawsuit against the doctor under a similar accusation.
VAN ZANDT COUNTY — A 43-acre battery energy storage facility started construction in December, but soon, that work could be brought to a halt. According to our news partner KETK, the Van Zandt County Fire Marshal has issued an order to Taaleri Energia, the company behind the Amador Energy Storage project, to follow all state fire codes or face the consequences.
GREGG COUNTY — The Greater Longview United Way, LANFest and CableLynx Broadband are teaming up to host the inaugural East Texas Gamer Con this Friday and Saturday, according to our news partner KETK.
TYLER — The University of Oxford Somerville College Choir concert at Marvin Methodist Church in Tyler Tuesday night has been canceled. Due to the fire at Heathrow Airport last week, the group was not able to make their flight.
EAST TEXAS — Texas Governor Greg Abbott has appointed a new 62nd Judicial District court judge who will cover cases in Delta, Franklin, Hopkins and Lamar counties. According to our news partner KETK, William âBillâ Harris of Paris is the current County Court Judge for Lamar County and Abbott has selected him to fill the 62nd Judicial District court judge seat for a term that will last till Dec. 31, 2026.