Federal judge rules Texas A&M can’t ban drag show

COLLEGE STATION – A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked Texas A&M University System from enforcing a ban on drag shows being held at its special event venues.

This means “Draggieland” will go on as planned on Thursday at the flagship university’s Rudder Theatre in College Station.

“Draggieland” is an annual pageant where contestants wear clothing or makeup that often, but does not always, run counter to their expected gender identity. The contestants dance and answer questions afterward about what drag and LGBTQ culture means to them. It has repeatedly sold out the 750-seat venue since it started in 2020.

In her ruling, Judge Lee H. Rosenthal said the student group that organizes “Draggieland”, the Queer Empowerment Council, was likely to succeed in showing the ban violates the First Amendment.

“Anyone who finds the performance or performers offensive has a simple remedy: don’t go,” Rosenthal wrote.

The students said while their fight isn’t over, they were overjoyed by the decision and vowed to share that joy by putting on the best show possible Thursday.

The Queer Empowerment Council, which organizes “Draggieland”, sued after the system’s board of regents passed a resolution last month banning drag performances across all 11 campuses. The council argued that the public universities are not allowed to censor student performances based on their personal dislike of its content or perceived ideology.

The regents said they were trying to comply with recent executive orders issued by President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Greg Abbott telling agencies not to promote “gender ideology” or else they could lose funding from the federal and state government. They’ve also argued drag shows mock and objectify women, which violates federal antidiscrimination law.

This follows previous drag show bans and First Amendment fights in court.

In 2023, Republican state lawmakers portrayed drag performances as inherently sexual and obscene. They passed Senate Bill 12, which prohibited performers from dancing suggestively or wearing certain prosthetics in front of children. But a court struck down the law as unconstitutional.

That same year, West Texas A&M University President Walter Wendler cancelled a student drag show, similarly arguing that such performances degrade women.

The students sued, but the judge in that case has so far held that drag shows are not clearly protected under the First Amendment in part because children were expected to attend.

No children are expected to attend “Draggieland”.

Texas A&M’s resolution also spurred the University of Texas System to prohibit its 14 institutions from sponsoring or hosting drag shows.

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

Attorney General’s impeachment cost Texas $5.1 million

AUSTIN – The impeachment of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton cost the state about $5.1 million in taxpayer funds, largely to pay for lawyers hired by House leaders to prosecute Paxton in a Senate trial that ended in his acquittal, according to a report released Friday by the State Auditor’s Office.

The total is roughly $900,000 higher than previously reported, based on records from the House’s impeachment case, which did not include a full tally of the chamber’s outside legal costs.

The House, which impeached Paxton over allegations that he accepted bribes and abused the authority of his office, accounted for nearly 87% of the state’s overall tab. Of the more than $4.4 million spent by the lower chamber, more than $4 million went to “contracted professional services,” which the auditor’s report described as “costs for attorneys, investigators, and other related costs.”

House records released in late 2023 show that invoices topped $3.5 million for the two renowned Houston attorneys who led the case against Paxton, Rusty Hardin and Dick DeGuerin.

Additionally, the auditor’s office found that the Texas Senate spent $435,000 on costs that included lawmakers’ per diem payments, travel, and producing the journal documenting the trial. The Attorney General’s Office spent an additional $230,000, while two other agencies — the Texas Legislative Reference Library and the Texas Legislative Council — combined to spend roughly $8,500.

The auditor’s report came at the request of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has spent more than a year pressuring the House to reveal its impeachment expenses. Patrick, a Republican who oversees the Senate and presided over Paxton’s trial, previously alleged that the House “spent like drunken sailors on shore leave” on the case.

Paxton’s impeachment created enormous strife between Patrick and former Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, who supported the impeachment effort. Earlier this month, the Lt. Governor wrote on social media that Phelan’s successor, Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, handed over “detailed expenditures” that Patrick then turned over to the State Auditor’s Office.

In a statement Friday, Patrick thanked Burrows for “his commitment to transparency” and slammed Phelan, saying the report showed he “frivolously wasted taxpayer funds for an ill-fated political gambit.”

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

Lawmakers push to spend billions of dollars for water projects

AUSTIN – Texas lawmakers agree that the answer to the state’s looming water crisis is to invest billions of dollars into fixing the problem. What they don’t agree on, at least for now, is exactly how to spend the money.

State. Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, and state Rep. Cody Harris, R-Palestine, filed bills this month that take big swings at solving the ongoing water issues plaguing Texas. They include investing billions of dollars into repairing and upgrading aging infrastructure like water pipes, as well as creating new water sources for the future.

The discussion comes at an important time — a Texas Tribune analysis found the state could face a severe water shortage by 2030 if there was a recurring, statewide record-breaking drought and if state leaders and water entities failed to use strategies that secure water supplies.

A pair of proposals — Senate Joint Resolution 66 and House Joint Resolution 7 — would allocate up to $1 billion a year to boost water projects. Their accompanying bills, House Bill 16 and Senate Bill 7, both would create new water committees to oversee the funding and promote investment into new water projects.

Gov. Greg Abbott has declared water an emergency item for this legislative session, which means the bills could be on a fast track in the Legislature.

Both proposals would funnel up to $1 billion a year to the Texas Water Fund — a special account voters approved in 2023 to help pay for water projects.

Perry’s resolution calls for 80% of the money to fund projects to create new water supplies and 20% to repair aging infrastructure. Harris’ resolution does not specify how the money would be split and would leave the structure how it is — letting the Texas Water Development Board decide how to prioritize projects.

The debate around the bills centers on whether to prioritize projects for new water sources or repairing aging water pipes that leak massive amounts of water throughout the state.

Water experts agree that projects to create new sources of water need to be funded. However, there is concern about neglecting repairs on water pipes around the state.

A Texas 2036 report estimated that the state needs nearly $154 billion by 2050 for water infrastructure, including $59 billion for water supply projects, $74 billion for leaky pipes and infrastructure maintenance, and $21 billion to fix broken wastewater systems.

Perry Fowler, executive director of the Texas Water Infrastructure Network, said the House and Senate will have to find a balance to move water legislation forward.

“I don’t think anybody takes issue with the fact that we need to invest in new water supplies,” Fowler said. “But there is a tremendous need to address aging infrastructure. We have a lot of immediate needs, like yesterday.”

Texas is looking to desalination to remove salt from seawater or brackish groundwater to create more water for drinking, irrigation and industrial uses.

Another strategy would be treating produced water, which is wastewater that comes out of the ground during oil and gas production. According to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, every barrel of oil produced also generates five barrels of wastewater.

Perry lists both options as eligible for state money in Senate Bill 7. He also acknowledged that old pipes are leaking massive amounts of water every year, calling that primarily a local issue.

“But I’m willing to leverage tax dollars, as we have in the past, and work on that at the same time,” Perry said. “But supply has to be priority one.”

Jennifer Walker, director for the Texas Coast and Water Program for National Wildlife Federation, said repairing old, leaking infrastructure should be considered a new water supply and urges lawmakers to be more liberal in that definition.

“Stopping that [water] loss and delivering more drops to customers, that is a new water supply for our communities,” she said. “We’re not delivering it to our customers otherwise, unless we address that.”

A 2022 report by Texas Living Waters Project, a coalition of environmental groups, estimated that Texas water systems lose at least 572,000 acre-feet per year, or about 51 gallons of water per home or business connection every day — enough water to meet the total annual municipal needs of Austin, El Paso, Fort Worth, Laredo and Lubbock combined.

Some of Texas’ water infrastructure is nearly as old as the state itself — the oldest pipes date back to as early as the 1890s. In 2019, Little Bill’s Plumbing in Pampa unearthed a wooden water pipe that experts believed could have been used before the city was incorporated.

Tom Gooch, vice president and a water resource planner with Freese and Nichols, said much of Texas’ water infrastructure is nearing the end of its useful life, but repairs remain largely a local responsibility — and funding is limited.

“The tradition in Texas has been that this kind of maintenance and repair tends to be a local responsibility.”

Many pipes across the state are over 100 years old, and underground pipes can be damaged when the ground around them expands and contracts during droughts and wetter weather cycles. Corrosion and leaks are hard to detect, and with thousands of miles of underground pipes, repairs are expensive and time-consuming.

Sources like the State Water Implementation Fund for Texas give local governments money to help, but there are more funding requests than the Water Development Board can fund.

Most of the experts agree that both new water supply and fixing deteriorating infrastructure is important. However, some think it would be best to keep giving the water development board discretion over how state money is spent.

Fowler, with the Texas Water Infrastructure Network, said he believes a lot of people supported the structure of the Texas Water Fund before because it was set up in a way to give flexibility to the board.

“If we’re too prescriptive, then it could potentially impact our overall spending power and what we can actually do,” Fowler said.

During a House committee meeting this week, Sarah Kirkle with the Texas Water Association testified in support of the House Joint Resolution. She said it would allow communities to meet new growth needs, upgrade existing facilities and fix broken lines. She was also in support of keeping the power to prioritize spending with the Water Development Board.

Gooch said repairing and keeping old infrastructure running is essential.

“I don’t know that you can rank it, you’ve got to do both,” Gooch said. “You’ve got to keep your system functioning well, and you’ve got to go find additional water to put into the system, to appropriately use your resources to get both those things done.”

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

Two DFW massage parlors closed for suspected human trafficking

AUSTIN – The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR) reports that it has issued six-month emergency closure orders effective March 19, 2025, that closes two DFW massage establishments for suspected human trafficking.

The shops, SY Foot on Belt Line road in Garland and Happy Feet Massage on Oakmont boulevard in Fort Worth, were ordered to halt operations. During two different inspections of the Garland location and one inspection of the Fort Worth location, TDLR inspectors and local Police Department officers found several indicators of possible human trafficking. These indicators included people living on the premises and items that are prohibited in a massage establishment. An online investigation also found that the locations was advertising on illicit webs sites. The Garland Police Department had received several complaints about possible human trafficking at the location.

In a House Bill passed in the 88th State Legislative Regular Session, the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation’s executive director can issue an emergency order halting the operation of any massage establishment if law enforcement or TDLR believes human trafficking is occurring at the establishment. Chiping Zhang, the owner and operator of two massage establishments, was so ordered to halt operations, and is also prohibited from operating different massage establishments at these locations for six months.

Texas death row inmate’s appeal is rejected by the Supreme Court

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from a Texas death row inmate whose bid for a new trial drew the support of the prosecutor’s office that originally put him on death row.

The justices left in place a Texas appeals court ruling that upheld the murder conviction and death sentence for Areli Escobar, even though Escobar’s case is similar to that of an Oklahoma man, Richard Glossip, whose murder conviction the high court recently overturned.

There was no explanation from the justices about why Escobar’s appeal met a different fate.

Unlike in Glossip’s case, Escobar is not facing imminent execution.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has twice rejected Escobar’s appeals. The first time followed a lower court decision ordering a new trial after the judge identified problems with the evidence. More recently, the appeals court again ruled against Escobar after the Supreme Court had ordered it to reconsider.

Escobar was convicted and sentenced to death in the May 2009 fatal stabbing and sexual assault of Bianca Maldonado, a 17-year-old high school student in Austin. They lived in the same apartment complex.

The focus of the prosecution case against Escobar was evidence from the Austin Police Department’s DNA lab.

But a later audit turned up problems at the lab that led Judge David Wahlberg of the Travis County District Court to conclude that Escobar’s trial was unfair.

“The State’s use of unreliable, false, or misleading DNA evidence to secure (Escobar’s) conviction violated fundamental concepts of justice,” Wahlberg wrote.

When the case returned to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Travis County prosecutors no longer were defending the conviction. Voters had elected a new district attorney, Jose Garza, who ran on a promise to hold police accountable in Austin, the state capital and county seat.

In Glossip’s case, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond backed the call to throw out the conviction and death sentence because the discovery of new evidence persuaded him Glossip did not have a fair trial.

The justices agreed, ruling that prosecutors’ decision to allow a key witness to give testimony they knew to be false violated Glossip’s constitutional right to a fair trial.

East Texas student sells pig for over $500,000 at Houston Rodeo

CENTER – Our news partner, KETK, reports that a 12-year-old from Center ISD accomplished an impressive feat during the 2025 Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo this week by selling a market barrow pig for a record $501,000.

Dallas Martinez, who is currently in the sixth grade, was named Junior Market Barrow Grand Champion and sold his championship market barrow pig for $501,000, which breaks the previous record by over $100,000.

Martinez has been competing in major stock shows since he was 9-years-old. The student’s father, Berto Martinez, is a member of the Center ISD faculty working for the maintenance department.

Federal judge strikes down Texas’ mail ballot ID requirement

SAN ANTOINIO – A federal judge in San Antonio has ruled that the state of Texas’ ID requirements for mail ballot applications are unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez on Thursday found that the provisions in the state’s 2021 voter security law SB1 discriminate against voters with disabilities.

Mail-in voters are principally people over the age of 65 and people with disabilities. Since the law was enacted, many voters reported having their ballots rejected because they didn’t provide an ID number, or the number they provided did not match the one the state had on file.

“The problem with that is that many Texans have more than one department of public safety ID number,” said Victor Genecin, an attorney with the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. “So the first hurdle for a voter who’s applying for an absentee ballot is they may not know which number is in the election system. And even if they do know which number is in the election system and they put it in correctly, the election system may not have the number right.”

Genecin cited testimony at trial, where the Texas Secretary of State conceded that more than 650,000 registration records in their system were incorrect.

He added that expert testimony at the trial estimated that more than 2 million people were unable to vote due to the ID restrictions.

The ruling ordered the Texas secretary of state to remove the requirements from mail-in ballot applications. However, the ruling came just weeks before Texas’ municipal elections, so they will remain in effect through May 3.

Judge Rodriguez also struck down provisions of SB1 that require those who assist voters to swear an oath under penalty of perjury.

“Normally when somebody says to you, ‘would you help me?’ you either step up to help them or you don’t. But you don’t say, you know, ‘what’s wrong with you? Why do you need help?’ You just help,” Genecin said. “And so the idea that that people who are disabled must explain why they’re unable to vote without assistance is offensive in itself.”

Genecin added that part of the oath is that the assister must swear to be understanding that if the voter turns out not to be eligible for assistance, then the vote could be invalidated.

“So it puts the assister in the position of having to evaluate whether the voter is eligible for assistance, and the word ‘eligible’ is not defined anywhere in the statute,’ he said.

The state of Texas was expected to appeal.

Opponents of SB1 applauded the decision and called it a victory for voters with disabilities.

“It truly is such a victory for voting accessibility, and it affirms that our electoral system must protect and prioritize the right of every voter to be able to participate fully,” said Elsie Cooke-Holmes, International President and Board Chair of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., a co-plaintiff in the case. “It really does provide an opportunity for the 3 million plus voters with disabilities in Texas to be able to exercise their rights to vote without undue hardship. It ensures that their voices will be able to be heard, and that their votes will actually count.”

Judge Xavier Rodriguez ruled last fall that the state of Texas could no longer investigate voter assistance efforts as a criminal act. The state of Texas has appealed that ruling.

Cooke-Holmes said her organization sees momentum in the challenge to SB1.

“We know the fight is not over. We are going to continue to advocate for policies that eliminate all forms of voter suppression,” she said.

SB1, which was passed in the wake of President Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud without evidence following the 2020 election, also limited early voting hours, banned 24-hour voting, eliminated drive-thru voting centers, limited multiple drop-off locations for mail ballots, limited the distribution of mail-in ballot applications and expanded the authority of partisan poll watchers.

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

City of Gladewater issues boil water notice

GLADEWATER — According to a report from our news partner, KETK, the City of Gladewater issued a boil water notice for all customers as of Thursday but announced it on Friday morning.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has required the City of Gladewater public water system to notify all customers who experienced low pressure or no water to boil their water before consumption. This includes water used for washing hands and faces, brushing teeth, and drinking water. (more…)

71-year-old killed in mobile home fire

TRINITY – According to a report from our news partner, KETK, a 71-year-old man died on Friday morning in a fire that burned a mobile home in Trinity.

Trinity County Sheriff Woody Wallace said James Barber, 71 of Trinity, died in a mobile home fire that happened on Clemons Street at around 5 a.m. on Friday.

According to Wallace, Trinity County law enforcement is investigating the cause of the fire.

East Texas fire departments taking extra precautions

HENDERSON COUNTY – Our news partner, KETK, reports that several counties across East Texas are seeing a higher risk of fires due to recent high winds and dry weather.

“Some of this is from people either just burning trash or trying to do controlled burns that get out of control with the current wind conditions that we’re experiencing,” South Van Zandt Volunteer Fire Department Deputy Chief David Birdsong said. He says the high call numbers are already putting a strain on their crews and resources.

“We’re doing what’s called emergency staffing. What that means is we have individuals that are willing to come in and staff the stations and be ready at a moment’s notice.” (more…)

Parents of Texas child who died of measles stand by decision to not vaccinate

GAINES COUNTY – The Texas parents of an unvaccinated 6-year-old girl who died from measles Feb. 26 told the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense in a video released Monday that the experience did not convince them that vaccination against measles was necessary.

“She says they would still say ‘Don’t do the shots,’” an unidentified translator for the parents said. “They think it’s not as bad as the media is making it out to be.”

The West Texas measles outbreak, the biggest in the state in 30 years, has infected more than 270 people and hospitalizing dozens of them. Public health officials have repeatedly told Texans that studies have time and time again shown that the safest and most effective way to avoid contracting the very infectious, life-threatening disease is to vaccinate with the measles-mumps-rubella shot.

The couple, members of a Mennonite community in Gaines County with traditionally low vaccination rates, spoke on camera in both English and Low German to CHD Executive Director Polly Tommey and CHD Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker.

“It was her time on Earth,” the translator said the parents told her. “They believe she’s better off where she is now.”

“We would absolutely not take the MMR,” the mother said in English, referring to the measles-mumps-rubella vaccination children typically receive before attending school. She said her stance on vaccination has not changed after her daughter’s death.

“The measles wasn’t that bad. They got over it pretty quickly,” the mother said of her other four surviving children who were treated with castor oil and inhaled steroids and recovered.

The couple told CHD that their daughter had measles for days when she became tired and the girl’s labored breathing prompted the couple to take her to Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock. There, the girl was intubated and died a few days later. The other children came down with measles after their sister died.

The parents’ interview was recorded Saturday and later posted on the website of Children’s Health Defense, an organization founded in 2007 by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now secretary for the U.S. Health and Human Services Department. Kennedy stepped down from the organization to run for president in 2023.

The deceased girl’s father insisted that measles helps build up a person’s immune system. “Also the measles are good for the body for the people,” the father said, explaining “You get an infection out.”

Infectious disease experts have urged the public to avoid attempting to achieve immunity through measles exposures. Measles carries too high of risks, including lifelong complications and death, compared to the generally mild side-effects from the vaccine.

The Mennonite community located in remote Gaines County, about 400 miles west of Dallas, has been the center of a West Texas measles outbreak. As of Tuesday, measles has spread to 279 patients in Gaines and nearby counties.

Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, which cared for the couple’s daughter, released a prepared statement on Thursday. They said the interview circulating online contains “misleading and inaccurate claims regarding care provided at Covenant Children’s” and that the hospital could not directly speak about the girl’s case because of patient confidentiality laws.

“What we can say is that our physicians and care teams follow evidence-based protocols and make clinical decisions based on a patient’s evolving condition, diagnostic findings and the best available medical knowledge,” the statement said.

Covenant Children’s reiterated that measles is a highly contagious, potentially life-threatening disease that often creates serious, well-known complications like pneumonia and encephalitis.

The hospital urged anyone with questions about measles to contact their health provider.

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

Texas is poised to make measles a nationwide epidemic

GAINES COUNTY – With its measles outbreak spreading to two additional states, Texas is on track to becoming the cause of a national epidemic if it doesn’t start vaccinating more people, according to public health experts.

Measles, a highly contagious disease that was declared eliminated from the U.S. in 2000, has made a resurgence in West Texas communities, jumping hundreds of miles to the northern border of the Panhandle and East Texas, and invading bordering states of New Mexico and Oklahoma.

Based on the rapid spread of cases statewide — more than 200 over 50 days — public health officials predict that it could take Texas a year to contain the spread. With cases continuously rising and the rest of the country’s unvaccinated population at the outbreak’s mercy, Texas must create stricter quarantine requirements, increase the vaccine rate, and improve contact tracing to address this measles epidemic before it becomes a nationwide problem, warn infectious disease experts and officials in other states.

“This demonstrates that this (vaccine exemption) policy puts the community, the county, and surrounding states at risk because of how contagious this disease is,” said Glenn Fennelly, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases and chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Texas Tech University. “We are running the risk of threatening global stability.”

The measles outbreak — the largest in the state in 30 years — has spread from two cases in late January to more than 270 cases and now includes 11 counties, most of them in the rural South Plains region.

So far this year, there have been more than 300 cases of measles confirmed across 15 states, as of March 13. The Texas outbreak, which makes up the bulk of those cases, is only linked to cases in New Mexico and Oklahoma, where state officials said this month that someone associated with the Texas outbreak was exposed.

Last month, Texas officials reported that an unvaccinated, otherwise healthy school-aged child died from measles, the first death from the virus in a decade.

This month, New Mexico officials said an unvaccinated adult in Lea County, about 50 miles away from the outbreak’s epicenter of Gaines County, who died had tested positive for measles. Officials are still confirming whether the cause of death was measles, according to the New Mexico Department of Health.

“This is a very multi-jurisdictional outbreak with three states involved and about seven or eight different local health departments, in addition to some areas where the state serves as the local health department. There are a lot of moving parts,” said Katherine Wells, director of public health for the City of Lubbock, during a Tuesday meeting of the Big Cities Health Coalition, a national organization for large metropolitan health departments.

Most of Texas’ measles cases are in unvaccinated school-aged children and are concentrated in the Mennonite community in Gaines County, which traditionally has low vaccination rates.

Wells said efforts to increase the vaccination rates in Gaines County, which is about 70 miles from Lubbock, and the surrounding region have been slow as trust in the government has seemingly reached an all-time low.

“We are seeing, just like the rest of Americans, this community has seen a lot of stories about vaccines causing autism, and that is leading to a lot of this vaccine hesitancy, not religion,” she said.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the politicization of vaccines and overall weariness to health mandates like quarantines and masks. Public health officials are now battling misinformation and public resistance to measles.

Wells said because the state can’t stop people from traveling, she fully expects this outbreak to last a year, and the surrounding states and the nation should prepare themselves for a potential spread.

“Measles is going to find those pockets of unvaccinated individuals, and with the number of cases and ability for people to travel, there is that risk of it entering other unvaccinated pockets anywhere in the United States right now,” Wells said.
Vaccine hesitancy

Fennelly was living in New York in the 1990s when pamphlets started getting passed around the Hebrew community warning against the unfound dangers of the measles vaccine. Soon, the vaccine refusal rate began to climb, and an outbreak started filling hospitals with sick infants.

Now, decades later, Fennelly is watching the same series of events play out in Texas.

“This could have been predicted. There have been steady rates of increased personal belief exemptions over the last several years leading to pockets of under-vaccination across the state,” he said.

In the West Texas region, misinformation about vaccines, distrust of local public health officials, and fear of government authority overruling family autonomy have reigned supreme, creating the pockets that measles infiltrated this year.

However, this is not just a South Plains problem but a statewide issue as vaccine exemptions continue to grow.

“We have several pockets of population that have high unvaccinated groups. We sent out a letter to public and private school districts with low vaccination rates explaining the situation and asking them to update their children’s shots,” said Phil Huang, director and health authority for Dallas County Health and Human Services, during the Big Cities Health Coalition meeting.

Texas requires children and students to obtain vaccines to attend schools, child care centers, and college. However, individuals can claim they are exempt if they are in the military, have a religious or personal belief that goes against getting immunized, or if a health provider determines it is not safe to do so.

Since 2018, the number of requests to the Texas Department of State Health Services for an exemption form has doubled from 45,900 to more than 93,000 in 2024.

Data suggests that vaccine exemptions and those living in areas with higher vaccine exemption rates for measles and pertussis are at increased risk of contracting these diseases. The authors of this data collection concluded that “geographic pockets of vaccine exemptions pose a risk to the whole community.”

Fennelly said the hurdles to obtaining exemptions are easy to clear, leading to an increasing number of people refusing the vaccine.

State lawmakers this session have filed more than a dozen bills that would strengthen or expand vaccine exemptions.

“We don’t have the capacity in Texas to deal with so many sick children if this continues to spread. We are already at our limit with seasonal influenza and respiratory syncytial virus. Our doctors are at their limit,” Fennelly said.

Simbo Ige, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health, had to deal with a measles outbreak in her city a year ago, with 64 individuals testing positive, 57 of whom were associated with a shelter. She said the quickest way they controlled the outbreak was quickly administering more than 30,000 doses of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine.

A Chicago Department of Health report projected a high probability of an outbreak of more than 100 cases without the city’s rapid intervention.

“It required a lot of education and messaging because people wanted the answer to why I need to get vaccinated. We started listing out the reasons — parents won’t be able to go to work, kids can’t go to school, and even worse, kids can get sick and die,” Ige said. “It’s 2025. We shouldn’t be having children dying from measles in this day and age. We have the tools. We just have to amplify the message.”

New Mexico’s public health officials started spreading awareness of vaccinations immediately after they learned Texas had its first measles case and before New Mexico got its first case.

“We started setting up clinics and getting the ball rolling,” Jimmy Masters, the southeast region director for the New Mexico Department of Health, said. “Let’s see what we can do to get people in the doors and vaccinated beforehand.”

Nearly 9,000 New Mexicans have received measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine shots between Feb. 1 and March 10. During that same time period last year, officials vaccinated 5,342 people.

Texas has held multiple vaccination clinics in the outbreak area, but according to the Texas Department of State Health Services, only 350 doses have been administered.

New Mexico has also emphasized its Vaxview website that keeps track of residents’ immunizations, allowing concerned people to check within seconds if they need a shot. Texas has a vaccine tracking program known as ImmTrac2, but it’s an opt-in program that doesn’t have most adult records. If someone doesn’t opt in by age 26, their records will not be retained.

“We told people to contact us to ensure their vaccine status is up to date,” Masters said. “If they aren’t sure, just call the health office so we can find out for them. And if they don’t have their records updated for the vaccine, then we can ask them to come in and take advantage of the clinics or come in as walk-ins.”

Because of this, most of Lea County is considered immunized, Masters said, so public health officials in New Mexico don’t view the outbreak as rapidly evolving.

Back in Texas, the opposite is playing out. Advice from public health officials is seemingly ignored, and vaccine efforts are struggling.

“We need to have a consistent message from all levels. We need to reinforce the message that vaccines are safe and vaccines are how you prevent this, and we have concerns when other messages dilute this message,” Huang said.

Texas Department of State Health Services officials are also encouraging people to vaccinate, but whether people will listen is out of the agency’s control.

“The only way to stop the virus from spreading is to get more people immunized. We are …providing education about the severe complications associated with measles infection, and directing them to locations where they can get vaccinated,” said Lara Anton, spokesperson for the state health agency.

Fennelly said the main difference between Lea County and Gaines County is the public acceptance of the vaccine and public health in general. He said if Texas wants to improve, there should be studies on why people are so hesitant to accept vaccines.

“We need to be asking why Gaines County? What are the concerns, and how do we, the health profession and public health officials, most effectively confront and allay those fears,” he said. “People shouldn’t be more afraid of the vaccine than the disease.”

A person with measles visits a friend, another visits kids at a college, and the other has friends over. Public health departments in West Texas are trying to trace the spread of measles, since other than strongly suggesting people quarantine, there’s nothing more local officials can do to prevent infected individuals from traveling.

“We shouldn’t be surprised in this kind of environment that we will have more cases,” said David Lakey, the vice chancellor for health affairs and the chief medical officer at the University of Texas System. “I think we need to work with individuals to ensure they stay home during an event like this.”

State lawmakers have stripped control from cities and counties from implementing mandates, such as closing businesses and schools. While some of these laws apply only to COVID-19, public health experts say it has created an environment where state health officials can only offer suggestions to Texans with little enforcement, allowing measles to continue to spread.

“The state of Texas is taking it seriously and trying to balance how they approach this while respecting the laws of the state and also people’s freedoms,” Lakey said. “They are doing it while also making sure that we are doing everything it can to identify people, provide vaccines, isolate individuals, and take all the other steps to address an event like this.”

With young children particularly vulnerable to the disease, Lakey said hospitals must screen people entering hospitals.

Wells said there have been a couple of women who gave birth at a Lubbock hospital who were infected with measles or were recently exposed to it, and babies six months old or younger have needed treatment with immunoglobulin because of exposure.

“That’s really why measles is so scary. It’s so communicable, and it’s so easy to enter some of the very vulnerable areas where babies don’t have those vaccinations yet,” she said. “That’s going to be day cares, schools, hospitals, pediatricians offices, and we’re seeing those cases more and more as this outbreak continues.”

This potential spread makes contact tracing necessary, but Wells said it is one of their region’s most significant challenges besides testing. While a laboratory set up in Lubbock has cut down wait times for tests results from 72 hours to one day, Wells said rural Texas doesn’t have the staff to track the travel of more than 270 people.

“This is going to be a large outbreak, and we are still on the side where we are increasing the number of cases, both because we’re still seeing spread and also because we have increased testing capacity, so more people are getting tested,” she said.

New Mexico has a lead investigator for contact tracing who interviews the patients, gathers medical records, establishes a point of contact, and organizes vaccinations for those who were potentially exposed to prevent spread.

While West Texas officials try to follow the same policies, the health care system is decentralized, meaning the contact tracing is done by the local health authority first, and then, if necessary, the state gets involved and possibly, assistance from the CDC.

Chris Van Deusen, spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said while the state is not necessarily struggling to contact trace, he acknowledges the extra manpower it requires.

“That also depends on the individuals talking with us and sharing that information. So that can be difficult, particularly when dealing with a more insular community. It can be difficult to make inroads, and that is why the local process is important,” Van Deusen said.

Experts say that as travel season ramps up and if Texas can’t seem to stop the spread, states nationwide should prepare themselves for what may come.

“The message to health departments is be ready, and schools need to think about this and government officials because this really does have the potential to grow beyond these three states,” Wells said.

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

UPDATE: Nacogdoches Teen charged with first-degree murder

NACOGDOCHES -Our news partner, KETK, reports that charges have been upgraded for a 17-year-old accused of shooting a man in Nacogdoches on Thursday.

Nacogdoches PD said officers responded to N. Popp Street at around 1 p.m. on Thursday after residents reported hearing the sound of gunshots. When they arrived, officers found a man who had been shot at least two times in the front yard of a home. The man was able tell them about the shooting before he was taken out of town by EMS for treatment. The victim, now identified as Gerber Panteleon-Palencia, 33, of Nashville was taken to a Tyler hospital for surgery, but passed away from his injuries. He was visiting family in Nacogdoches when the shooting took place.

Hernan Cuarenta, 17 of Nacogdoches, was originally charged with aggravated assault and theft of a firearm. Those charges have now been upgraded to first-degree murder.Cuarenta being held at the Nacogdoches County Jail. (more…)

Texas’ first abortion arrests stem from month-long attorney general investigation

TOMBALL – Two people have been arrested and charged with performing illegal abortions at a Houston-area health clinic, the first criminal charges brought under the state’s near-total abortion ban.

Maria Margarita Rojas, 48, a licensed midwife, and Jose Ley, 29 and her employee, were charged with the illegal performance of an abortion, as well as practicing medicine without a license. The abortion charge is a second-degree felony, which comes with up to 20 years in prison.

Rojas, who identified herself as Dr. Maria, operates a network of clinics in Waller, Cypress and Spring, where she “unlawfully employed unlicensed individuals who falsely presented themselves as licensed medical professionals,” according to a press release from Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Rojas, with Ley’s assistance, attempted an abortion on a person identified as E.G. on two separate occasions in March, according to court records. In interviews with investigators, E.G. said Rojas’ employees portrayed her as a doctor, so when Rojas told E.G. that her pregnancy was likely non-viable, she agreed to take the abortion pills Rojas offered.

The woman told investigators that she would have continued the pregnancy, but “since the gynecologist informed her of medical complications that would arise should she continue with the pregnancy, she relied on that medical advice.”

In its bail motion, the state says Rojas also performed an abortion in Harris County earlier this year. Calls to Rojas’ clinics were not immediately answered Monday.

Court records show Rojas was first arrested on March 6, charged with practicing medicine without a license and given a $10,000 bond. She was again arrested Monday morning, alongside Ley, and charged with practicing medicine without a license and performing illegal abortions. A third person, Rubildo Labanino Matos, was arrested March 8 and charged with conspiracy to practice medicine without a license, Paxton said Tuesday.

On Thursday, a Waller County judge granted a temporary injunction effectively shutting down Rojas’ clinics by prohibiting them from providing medical services. The injunction expires after 14 days, but a hearing scheduled for next week will likely extend it.

The investigation into Rojas’ practices spanned more than a month and involved more than a dozen people with the Office of the Attorney General, the arrest affidavit shows.

It started with an anonymous complaint filed to the state Health and Human Services Commission, alleging two women had received abortions at the Clinica Waller Latinoamericana in Waller. K.P., 26, had an abortion at three months pregnant in September 2023, and D.V. had an abortion at eight weeks pregnant in January, the affidavit said.

The complaint was initially filed Jan. 17, and in a follow-up email a week later, the person who sent the complaint said the facility had been performing abortions “for some side money” for some time. They said the two abortions they were aware of were not due to medical complications and suggested the patients acted irresponsibly by “not wanting to protect themselves using birth control.”

Investigators with attorney general’s office and the Harris County Sheriff’s Office began surveilling Rojas’ clinics in late January and early February. They observed a man later identified as Ley working alone in one of the clinics as people came in and out, apparently seeking medical care.

Ley is not licensed to practice medicine in Texas. He was a licensed doctor in Cuba, but came to the United States illegally in 2022 and later was paroled and received a green card, according to the affidavit. Ley later told investigators that he was connected with Rojas after training with the global health nonprofit Doctors without Borders.

Ley told investigators that he saw patients as a medical assistant and would consult via tablet with someone he believed to be Labanino Matos, before signing forms with Labanino Matos’ name.

Labanino Matos, a licensed nurse practitioner, was under an agreed order from the Texas Board of Nursing for negligent treatment of a patient at another clinic. Texas law requires nurse practitioners to have a practice agreement with a licensed physician, which the affidavit says Labanino Matos did not have in place for these clinics.

In late February, the woman identified as D.V. confirmed that she received an abortion and identified Rojas as the person who performed the procedure, per the affidavit.

On March 3, an investigator was observing one of the clinics when a car pulled up and a young couple went inside. Only Ley was at the clinic, the investigator said, but after a time, Rojas arrived as well. When the couple left, it was clear the woman had undergone some sort of medical procedure, the investigator said.

On March 5, the attorney general’s office secured arrest warrants and search warrants for Rojas, Labanino Matos and Ley on charges of practicing medicine without a license. The search warrants found misoprostol, a common abortion-inducing drug that can also be used for other medical purposes, as well as ultrasound machines, forceps and other medical supplies.

Ley spoke to investigators, but Rojas declined.

While those arrests were unfolding, investigators tracked down and interviewed the woman who had been at the clinic on March 3. Identified as E.G. in the records, she said she had delivered twins by cesarean section six months prior and went to the clinic on the advice of her doctor in Mexico.

She said employees referred to Rojas as a gynecologist. Rojas told E.G. she was four weeks pregnant, but there was only an 18% chance of the pregnancy being successful. Lab results showed there was only a 9% chance of a successful pregnancy, E.G. said, which Rojas told her was insufficient to continue with the pregnancy.

Rojas gave her a pill orally, and Ley administered an IV and an iron injection. The next day, when she hadn’t had the expected bleeding, she returned to the clinic and was given an additional dose of the medication orally and vaginally. She later learned the medication was misoprostol.

E.G. paid $1,320 total for the consultations. She told investigators she was “shocked” to learn Rojas was not a gynecologist.

Based on this information, the attorney general’s office charged Rojas and Ley with performing an illegal abortion.

The state recommended Rojas and Ley each be held on a million dollar bond. On Monday, a Waller County judge ordered their bonds set at $500,000 for the abortion-related charges and $200,000 for the medical license charges.

Holly Shearman, a midwife who runs Tomball Birth Center, where Rojas worked part-time providing prenatal care, said she was “shocked” by the news of her arrest. She described Rojas as a devout Catholic and skilled midwife whose clinics provided health care to a primarily Spanish-speaking, low-income community.

“I don’t believe it for one second,” she said about the allegations. “I’ve known her for eight years and I’ve never heard her talk about anything like that. I just can’t picture Maria being involved in something like this.”

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

UT Tyler appoints new athletic director

TYLER – Our news partner, KETK, reports that the University of Texas at Tyler has appointed a new athletic director who has over 25 years of leadership experience in college athletics.

Dr. Sam Ferguson, who has spent the past 15 years serving as the athletic director at Abilene Christian University, has been selected as UT Tyler’s next athletic director. Prior to his time at ACU, Ferguson worked as director of athletics at Averett University. Before beginning his professional career, Ferguson received his bachelor’s degree from Averett, where he was also a member of the school’s basketball and golf teams. He went on to earn his Masters in Sports Management at Nova Southeastern University along with a doctorate from East Tennessee State University. (more…)

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